The Best Horror Movie of 2016: The Witch

The Film: The Witch
Director: Robert Eggers

Isolation and horror truly do make for natural bedfellows. The act of removing oneself from society promises a sort of freedom, but also an obvious state of naked vulnerability. To march into the wilderness is to give up the safety net of collective strength and the emotional support offered by civilization, relying entirely on one’s own prowess. And unfortunately, it’s all too easy to overestimate that strength, and never realize it until it’s already too late.

The events of The Witch can be perceived as a punishment for that sort of reckless pride. In 1630, patriarch William packs up his family into a wagon and rolls out into the country, following a confrontation with the town’s religious and cultural elite. In doing so, he’s stranding them in the wilderness, at the mercy of the elements, the backbreaking futility of subsistence farming, and the apparent threat of supernatural invasion, all thanks to his unwillingness to live under someone else’s doctrine. He’s proud, not just of himself but of the challenge he’s making his family take on, self-righteous in a way unique to a certain breed of asshole that it’s clearly impossible he could be making the wrong choice, unconcerned with how this will cause his wife and children to suffer. In the eyes of William, there’s only one imperative to live up to, and that’s the moral imperative that he himself defines. He is arrogant in the extreme, claiming that “we will conquer this wilderness,” as if the world is a tame animal ready to roll over and offer up its bounty to him, the man fated to exploit it. Suffice to say, he could scarcely be more wrong.

Soon, the family’s baby boy has gone missing, and talk of the unholy rears its ugly head. Most films in the mold of The Witch would likely make the presence of the titular creature a metaphorical one, or the object of psychological mystery—are supernatural events actually afoot, or at we simply witnessing a descent into finger-pointing and hysteria, of the sort famously associated with the Salem witch trials? The Witch, on the other hand, leaves no doubt—we see exactly what happened to that poor baby within minutes, and we know with certainty what kind of evil dwells in the woods surrounding the family’s farm. As Paste’s Dom Sinacola put it: “Eggers shows us the titular threat, taking a mortar and pestle to all Witch Trials allusions, grinding them to a pulp. The ‘unknown’ is no longer whether actual evil exists or not—the ‘unknown’ is why that evil should even exist at all.”

Thrust into this slowly building mania and accusatory hellhole is Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, in a scintillating debut), a young teenage girl on the cusp of womanhood, about to fully enter a society where only rigid oppression seems to await. It’s clear from the start that there’s no future here for Thomasin, nor any of the other children, really—they’re just pieces of chattel who would presumably grow old on the makeshift farm, supporting dying parents until they themselves succumb to a strain of illness or particularly crushing winter. One can hardly blame Thomasin for lusting after some kind of escape, any kind of escape that would offer a reason to go on living. If you watch The Witch and think, at the end, that you’d make some other choice than to “live deliciously,” that would be delusion in action.

Faith, it is clearly pointed out, is no comfort here, in a land where even faith has been stripped of any comforting or redeeming qualities. Here, in the mania of religious extremism, the quest for faith and purity is so all consuming and reverent that there’s no room for tenderness or humanity in the experience. The God that Thomasin and her family pray to (constantly) in this film isn’t the merciful, all-loving, beneficent creator deity who wants nothing more than for you to be comfortable “being yourself.” This God, taking advantage of the presence of real, indisputable evil running wild in the wilderness, is one who demands strict obedience and utter humbleness before His omnipotence if you want His favor, and would surely punish (severely) any infractions. Hell, this God probably enjoys punishing those who aren’t sufficiently righteous, reasoning that getting His kicks is only His right. This is His universe, after all—He can do as he pleases with it, and who are you to say otherwise?

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident horror guru. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.