The popularity of Stree and Munjya suggests that cinemagoers like scary films drawn from folk tales and laced with humour. Indian movies such as Tumbbad that explore folkloric beliefs without the crutch of comedy are not so conventionally successful, but their day will come. Elements untamed by civilisation, creeping anxiety, humans reverting to an animal state – folklore is a fertile source of horror, as proved by Robert Eggers’s The Witch.
The 2015 production marked Eggers’s directorial debut as well as introduced Anya-Taylor Joy to cinema. The Witch is set in the 1630s in New England, the American settlement established by recently emigrated Britishers. The settlers have brought along to the new country Puritan values as well as occult beliefs.
William (Ralph Ineson), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), his eldest daughter Thomasin (Taylor-Joy) and his three other children move to a house on the outskirts of a forest. William has been ex-communicated from his community after a dispute.
The happiness over a new-born baby proves to be short-lived. The change of mood is sudden, and brutal. William’s stern religiosity, the younger son’s curiosity about the adolescent Thomasin’s changing body, and the forced return to the whimsies of nature all lead to a frightening time for the family.
The Witch can be rented from Prime Video and Google Play. A large-as-possible screen is recommended to watch an austere drama marked by stunning visuals, sinister music and a consistent tone of escalating dread.
The red of blood leaps out of the bleached colour palette. Beautifully lit and framed by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, The Witch creates its effect without resorting to gimmicky jump scares. Apart from Anya Taylor-Joy, who is terrific in the lead role, the movie has unsettling performances by the three child actors who play Thomasin’s siblings.
Even the billy-goat that prances about cannot be trusted. Eggers infuses into the film enough ambiguity to make you wonder whether Thomasin is actually haunted or is in the middle of a fever dream.
Eggers keyed up the treatment in his follow-up films The Lighthouse and The Northman. His mastery over the uncanny, as well as his skill for suggestiveness, will be tested once again in his remake of FW Murnau’s silent-era classic Nosferatu, an unsanctioned adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Eggers’s Nosferatu is scheduled for a December 25 release. Perhaps there is no better way to end the year than with a date with a vampire.
