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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