The Witch - Salem's prequel

Good witch stories are hard to come by, as we saw with the Magicians! I quite liked the TV Show SALEM so this movie was right up my alley. I had heard quite a bit about The Witch before watching it. It was praised at several film festivals for a while now and I am glad I got to see it.

The first half of this movie, while being very creepy and dark focused mostly on this family who got banished from their New England village. You could believe that the time period chosen is cliche for a movie dealing with magic but I will always love seeing a historical background to a more supernatural premise. I feel like it anchors it in reality and makes it very believable. Having a huge passion for history and supernatural, this movie really pulled the right strings for me. It did help that the production design and costumes were absolutely stunning, I enjoyed the fact that they spent some time reflecting on the wilderness that America was when settlers from England arrived. You really understand the struggle and the anguish people must have felt when moving to this new and untamed part of the world. This is one of the reason, apart from religious fanaticism, that made people turn against each other. In any case, the viewer is graced with beautiful landscapes and scenery, really planting the decor for this story.

The characters in the Witch totally drew me in from the get go. Everybody's performance was outstanding, especially the children's. I found myself hating some characters within minutes and rooting for others in the same amount of time. I really cared about everybody's fate, whether I wanted them to die in agony or prevail. The fact that most of this movie is about a family's dynamic in this harsh environment is very interesting and makes the whole story so much more enticing. The casting was so good that the characters totally worked on every level. Catherine, the mom, was so creepy it was really easy to hate her. The dad was just cutting wood all the time, Once he looked like a half naked Jesus cutting wood. I felt like it was the way to relieve stress back in the day. There was no gym so I guess cutting wood was the next best thing! The twins were also the most annoying characters I have seen. I just wanted them to get slaughtered quickly. In this stressful, tensed and quiet environment, they were only a source of disturbance and cacophony. They also scarred and tortured that poor little goat and I hated that. Urgh those kids. Speaking of animals, there is a sweet little dog living with this crazy family and I tried to find whether the dog dies online and couldn't find any information. So I had to keep watching. Well, the dog dies, and I wish I'd known because I would have stopped watching. I fast forwarded through it though. I hate movies where animals are killed or in pain or anything similar to that. If you are like me, just don't watch The Witch. Thankfully, the body count was pretty high on the human side too so I was happy with the balance.

The music and sounds in this film are what really stood out for me. A good "horror" movie always needs to play with sound and silence smartly. I felt like they totally achieved that beautifully. There's not a lot of dialogue in the first part of the film and often there is no noise at all, which makes for a very eerie and uncomfortable atmosphere. I imagine this to be much like it was in that time period though. For me, it not only added to the creepy supernatural nature of the film, it added to the realism of the situation. If there was one tiny fault I was forced to find with this movie it would be the fact that the first 20 minutes were slightly confusing and left the viewer asking many questions. However, it totally hooked me so I am not sure it was a bad thing.
There are some very disturbing scenes in the Witch. One of which involved a nipple and a crow and boy, I had a hard time watching that! Everybody in this family basically went mad and I love how the magic is, as it is in most Salem related stories, a metaphor for settlers insecurities and paranoia induced by religious fanaticism and need for survival. Religion is bloody crazy, this is what I will take away from this film, The Witch is very much a focused use case for the Salem trials within the family nucleus. It left me wanting more and stay within the world and follow the rest of the main character's story. That's a job well done!

5/5 CATS!