Saturday 3 October 2020

Review: "The Witch"

 

EGGERS, Robert, “The Witch – A New England Folktale”, A24/Parts & Labor/RT Features/Rooks Nest Entertainment/Maiden Voyage & Motte Street Pictures/Code Red Productions/Scythia Films/Special Projects, 2015.

An ongoing complaint that I have with horror movies of late is that they don’t really say anything new. There’s a lot of pretty photography, some swell acting and interesting use of special effects (both digital and otherwise), but on the whole it’s all in support of material which is pretty lacklustre. The recent version of “The Colour Out of Space” springs to mind as does “Midsommar” – very nice to look at but nothing we haven’t seen before. Here too, we have the same notion – this is a very attractive piece of work but the story, the issues it wrestles with, the themes and subtext, are all tired old notions and tropes that offer nothing new to what has been done elewhere. It interests me to note that the production house A24 helped make this thing (along with a mind-boggling slew of other companies) and that they also had a hand in making “Midsommar” as well as Eggers’s next offering “The Lighthouse”. Is the creation of cinematic white bread fare (“Lighthouse” excepted) their raison d’être I wonder?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing from a certain point of view. Many old-time film staples are no longer available, in any kind of format. Old ground-breaking movies are referenced as seminal but aren’t screening anywhere, able to be purchased on disc or tape, or streaming on any platform, even YouTube (although what IS available on YouTube is pretty amazing). Taking these old horror stand-bys and putting them through a 21st Century production routine is one way of ensuring that the old ideas don’t disappear into the haze of current blockbuster fare – there’s a reason we have radio stations that play Golden Oldies. However, it seems to me that these “new” films rarely take the time to acknowledge their roots and to tip their hats to the masters of yore. Memories are long however, and there are those of us who are simply left scratching our heads and saying “and…?”.

Basically, if you’ve seen “Children of the Corn” or “The Wicker Man”, you’ve seen “Midsommar”; if you’ve seen “Creepshow” or “The Thing from Another Planet”, you’ve seen “The Colour Out of Space”. Here, if you’ve seen “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, then you’ve seen “The Witch”. It’s not as if the storylines are necessarily the same – if fact they’re suitably different – but the issues, the tropes, the way the plots unfold, the issues which they dangle from, are all standard and well-thumbed. In fact, they’re expected, to such a degree that these films must only be considered pastiche versions of earlier material, with an unacknowledged fealty to what has gone before.

There’re are some caveats with this movie. The long list of production companies that starts the film is a clear indicator that this is a first feature from an upcoming director. When you’re new, you have to hustle a lot to get funds for your project, and here it’s clear that Eggers spent a long time schmoozing before his film got green lit. A common feature of this practice is that you don’t want to scare away the money by doing something that’s too ‘out there’, that’s untried and which may not induce a return on investment by attracting viewers. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Eggers’s first feature is somewhat comfortable; that it’s a safe option in many respects: we have to acknowledge that there would be no “Lighthouse” without the “Witch” paving the way.

That being said, Eggers does work hard to make his piece seem a little bit above the herd. He is a stickler for period detail and there’s plenty to enjoy here. The language especially rings true here, taken as it is from old journals and court case transcriptions: if you’re going to build characters from their dialogue you can do worse than use the actual words of those who lived when your story is set. The result is very satisfying and works better than just having the actors bung on a cod-Brit accent and tossing in handfuls of “thees” and “thous”. Of course, using actual Brits to portray your nascent Americans is a smart step also. There are nice period details outside of the language too – the wardrobe and set design has all been obviously well-researched and the functioning of this stuff is nicely established.

Eggers likes having animals act in his flicks and this caused me huge problems during “The Lightouse”. I had to stop the film at the point when Young Thomas thrashes the seagull to death and I spent a long time checking up whether or not they had actually killed a bird on film – thankfully they did not. Here in “The Witch” there are a lot of animals involved – several goats, a horse, a dog and some ravens – and I was bit leery of some of it. There are at the end, several goat carcases lying about which always gives me pause – the sophistry that “these are animals which will probably be killed anyway so let’s record it for posterity”, is a thin and nasty one as far as I’m concerned and needs to be stopped, otherwise we should just go all Michael Cimino on our movies and kill anything that moves for the sake of cinema verité (I don’t think). This is cinema people, not snuff video production. There are standards. There are actually moments in “the Witch” where it’s clear that no animals are involved in some of the scenes where they are crucial, and that their involvement is implied rather than shown. Black Phillip’s attack on William is revealed as a jump-cut and the resulting collapse of the burgeoning log pile is filmed so that neither the actor or the animal – it’s clear – are anywhere near the potential danger. It’s nowhere near as bad as the fact that Barry Lyndon’s leg is actually stuck through the bed he’s lying on at the end of the eponymous film, but it’s ballpark.

Along with this there’s a confusing moment after Thomasin and Caleb are lost in the forest and their horse – Bert – is scared off. Caleb tries to re-locate it and only finds a mutilated body fallen into a thicket at a later stage. I had to stop the film at his point because it wasn’t clear if the body was that of the horse or of the dog (which had also fled from the witch’s assault): it was far in the background, fuzzy and indistinct. Kudos for sparing us the trauma of a dying animal but points off for nebulosity.

The atmosphere of the film is suitably moody and dark, in line with the tempestuous emotions of the players. Eggers’s film crew, under the guidance of Jarin Blashcke, are top notch and really deliver the goods here, while offering a promise of what was to come in their next project. The supernatural elements are all nicely low-key, allowing an equivocal perspective on the events while also delivering some good shocks. The apple was a particularly nice touch, I thought. The ending felt a little twee to me – if the reveal that (*gasp!*) the witches are real was supposed to be startling, then it was killed at birth (much like the infant Samuel at the start, which was genuinely alarming and which actually de-bags the cats that the ending was relying upon). I was left wondering why we were being asked to be shocked by something which, from the beginning, was a fait accompli.

All of this aside, this is an entertaining work but, if you’re the sort of person who gets stressed by the tangles of bigoted religious distrust upon which “The Crucible” is built, then you might want to steel yourself. Eggers takes old cloth and makes new jackets from it – not as ineptly as in that despicable version of the “The Scarlet Letter” that starred Demi More and Gary Oldman (shudder!) – in fact, it’s quite an engaging piece. But nevertheless, it’s still old ground being covered.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Postscript: The marketing for this film is really annoying. If you look it up online you’ll see a cool image of a goat’s head (Black Phillip) and the standard title and tagline. But when I bought the DVD, the cover here in Australia is a cheesy shot of a naked chick walking through the woods under a full moon (as seen above). I mean, who makes these shit decisions? I’d rather have the goat’s head image than yet another cheesecake-y soft-porn shot that makes me uncomfortable when I front up to the cash register. All I can say is that marketing types have filthy, dirty little minds that inevitably run to lowest denominator thinking. This film is not about naked chicks walking through forests; it’s about something else. I refuse to even consider the possibility that the promoters of this DVD actually watched the thing – they just looked at some screen grabs and said, “that’ll do it – the shot with the naked chick”. Sheesh!

The other point that bothers me is the amount of flak the title gets for printing the word “witch” with two V’s rather than a W. Lots of commentators bitch about how, by the time this film is set, W’s were in common parlance and no longer cobbled together from unused V’s. Now, that might be true, but when you’re pilgrim settlers on uncharted shores, your available stocks of movable type are limited and, if you’ve lost your W, then two Vs will do it. Cut these guys some slack!


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