Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) is a film that slinks rather than sprints, creeping through the forest like a Puritan’s bad thought—sluggish, ominous, and a little bit horny. Billed as a “New England folktale,” it’s the kind of arthouse horror movie that makes you check if your coffee’s still warm and your patience still intact. It’s bleak, atmospheric, and shot with a kind of cold detachment that suggests Eggers spent his childhood doing community theater reenactments of The Scarlet Letter—but with more goats and less redemption.
Set in 1630s New England, the plot follows a family of exiled Puritans who decide to make a go of it in the middle of an uninviting forest, because nothing bad ever happens when you isolate yourself from society and trust God to do the plumbing. The patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson, whose voice sounds like a hangover in chainmail), is booted from the plantation for being a little too holy, which is impressive considering this is a group that thought dancing was foreplay for Satan. So off they go: William, his pious wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), their teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, in her breakout role), and their increasingly cursed brood of children, to scratch out a living in a place where corn dies faster than hope.
It doesn’t take long for things to go pear-shaped. The baby disappears during a game of peekaboo (yes, really), the crops rot, and there’s a general sense that the Devil might be hiding behind the next dead tree—or possibly inside one of the kids. Or the goat. Or maybe the butter churn. The film plays its cards close to the vest, offering just enough dread and suggestion to keep you guessing while also slowly convincing you that everyone here deserves a good old-fashioned group exorcism.
This is not a jump-scare horror movie. This is dread with a bonnet. Eggers directs with precision and a fetish for authenticity so intense it borders on madness. The dialogue is in archaic English pulled straight from diaries and court records of the time, so if you’ve ever wanted to hear “Wouldst thou” and “Fie!” in a non-sarcastic tone, this is your jam. It’s like watching a Ken Burns documentary where someone gets possessed instead of dying of dysentery.
The performances are solid across the board. Ineson’s William is a bearded sermon machine, a man whose pride in his moral rectitude is only matched by his complete lack of survival skills. Kate Dickie is perfectly cast as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown who seems like she might slap the Holy Spirit if He looked at her wrong. The real discovery here is Anya Taylor-Joy, whose Thomasin is all wide eyes and tremulous innocence—until she isn’t. Her slow transformation (or is it revelation?) is the engine of the story, even if that engine sometimes feels like it’s running on molasses.
And then there’s Black Phillip. The goat. The horned scene-stealer. He does what all great horror mascots do: he says nothing, does little, and still somehow steals the show. At one point he whispers to Thomasin—yes, whispers, and it is both absurd and somehow chilling. Is he Satan? A metaphor? Just a really charismatic barn animal? Hard to say. But by the time you hear “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” you’ll either be completely sold or desperately Googling how much of this movie is left.
Where The Witch excels is in tone. Eggers creates a world where you can practically smell the damp earth and hear the worms plotting. The cinematography is washed-out gray, as if the film reel had been soaked in Puritan guilt. The score—a shrieking, choral nightmare—rubs against your nerves like burlap underwear. This is a film obsessed with mood, and to its credit, it builds one hell of a moody sandbox.
But that mood comes at a price. Pacing, for one. There are times when The Witch threatens to grind to a halt entirely. Whole scenes drift by like ominous sermons, drenched in misery and Old English, with characters staring off into the middle distance like they just realized the earth is flat and the fun is gone. You keep waiting for something big to happen, and while there are flashes of horror—particularly the baby’s disappearance and a moment involving a raven that will ruin your appreciation for birdwatching—they are few and far between. This is a slow-cooked meal that occasionally forgets to turn the oven on.
Thematically, The Witch explores repression, faith, puberty, and how terrifying it is to be a teenage girl in a world that thinks you’re either a saint or a satanic temptress. There’s a clear feminist undercurrent, and the final moments of the film have been heralded by some as a triumph of female agency. Others may see it more as a cautionary tale about what happens when your family is so repressed they make Little House on the Prairie look like a Vegas bachelor party.
The ending, by the way, is where Eggers really leans in. It’s both haunting and strangely triumphant. It’s also ridiculous—witches levitating in the woods like an evil Cirque du Soleil—but somehow it works. Maybe because by that point, you’re so starved for catharsis that you’ll take anything resembling action, even if it involves airborne nudity and goat-based theology.
Ultimately, The Witch is an artful, atmospheric, and deeply committed film that sometimes mistakes mood for momentum. It’s a horror movie for people who like their scares served with academic footnotes and a side of bleak existentialism. It’s not for everyone. Hell, it might not even be for most people. But if you’ve ever looked at a painting of colonial suffering and thought, “Yes, but what if Satan was also here?” then congratulations, this one’s for you.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 goats.
Wouldst thou recommend it? Maybe. But only if thou canst endure the slow churn of dread and hath not forsaken thy subtitles.