BEFORE: You see my problem, right? By treating romances and horror films as polar opposites, maintaining two separate months that are allocated just for those two types of films, I manage to miss out on a lot of connections. James McAvoy was in "Becoming Jane", which was a period romance film, and then he turns up not only in "Filth", which I was treating as a horror film of sorts, but also films like "Glass". Same goes for Anya Taylor-Joy, she was in "Emma." earlier this year, another period romance, and now today she's in a period horror film. Things would be so much easier, perhaps, if I could mix all the films together - as it is, I have to look for actors who are in TWO horror films, or TWO romances, just to make everything work out. So, it would be great if all actors could just confine themselves to making one kind of film, OK? Thanks, I really appreciate it. (Yes, both actors have appeared in the X-Men franchise films, but that doesn't help, that's not going to bridge the gap between February and October.)
Kate Dickie carries over from "Filth".
THE PLOT: A family in 1630's New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic and possession.
AFTER: Yes, I know that on the poster, the name of this film looks like "The VVitch", with two V's in place of one W. Supposedly that's because we didn't have the letter "W" back in the 1630's, but is that accurate? How can that be possible? We had the "Wuh" sound, right? People didn't say the word "witch" like "vitch", so WTF? Or, VVTF? Besides, we call the letter "double-U" and not "double-V", so some more research is required here - however, I can't get Wikipedia to work on my computer, some certificate has expired, so that's making things rather difficult. Let me try my phone....
Huh, according to Wiki, the classical Latin alphabet did not have the "W" character - the "wuh" sound we know today came from using two "U" letters together - but Germans were using the double-V or double-U in the 8th Century, and the changeover to a new letter was very gradual, which is maybe why the capital "W" looks like two V's and the small "w" sometimes looks like two u's. But on Wiki there's a poster from the Salem Witch (sorry, UUitch) trials, that spells "Witches" with two capital U's - but ONLY in some fonts. The first line of that poster reads "The Wonders of the Invisible World", and uses W's just fine. But I guess if the particular font you wanted to use on your printing press didn't have a W, it was still OK in 1693 to use double u's. Which is why we still call the letter Double-U.
Still, I'm not buying it, because the U.S. colonials in the 1630's still should have known what a W was. But bear in mind, these people also thought that the devil walked around in the form of a black goat. This film is set a few decades before the infamous Salem witch trials, but clearly this is meant as a precursor to that. Pretty much everybody agrees now that there might not have been actual witches in Salem, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" took care of that - even though that play used the setting as an allegory for Communism and The Red Scare, it opened the door to other explanations for the Salem witches. Either there were Puritans dabbling in the dark arts, or perhaps everybody was lying, or perhaps everybody was pointing fingers at others to save themselves. Right?
Look, you have to go back and think about who founded this country, a bunch of stubborn Puritans. When I saw the Capitol insurrection that took place in January of this year, it made me think of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution - we had a bunch of angry Colonials who dressed up like Native Americans and dumped shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor because they were tired of oppressive government, high taxation and well, they were bored and frustrated and looking for an outlet. So that's the same spirit that made people today dress up in buffalo heads and MAGA hats and try to tear down the Capitol - in some sense, it's who we are as a country (some of us, anyway) and while it didn't work this time, it came from somewhere in the past, the rebellious nature of frustrated, unsatisfied Americans.
But the Puritans were different, although ultra-conservative in their own way. These were the people who were so uptight about religion that they were kicked out of several countries in Europe, including usually uptight Britain. (Eating butter was considered a sin, let that one sink in for a moment...). It's best to send them off to the wilds of America, where (if they survive the harsh winters) they can go to church twice a day, chastise themselves to remove their impure thoughts, and have enough missionary sex to populate the colonies, even if that just brings them waves and waves of guilt and regret.
What do you get in a society that repressed? The kids are being home-schooled, in between the 47 hours of farm chores that everybody had to do each day, so if the teenagers got a little randy, they were probably going to peek at their brothers and sisters undressing, or "take matters into their own hands", if you know what I mean. Plus there were animals on the farms, doing what animals do, so all around there were triggers that led to bad, naughty things. Plus, remember, it's the 1630's, so there were all kinds of fairy tales and folklore things, and then there was the Bible, filled with stories about the Devil and Hell, but also people from Biblical times gettin' it on, and fornicating here and there and begetting this person over there. It was a minefield of temptation, sins, and then guilt and regret in a vicious cycle.
This film shows how religion, folklore, a bit of careless teasing between kids, combined with dealing with the rugged weather, relentless, mind-numbing chores, and a bit of normal teenage horniness might have come together to create a perfect storm of shame, blame and falsehoods regarding things like witchcraft. A teenager might easily dabble with a spoken wish or a spell or even knowledge of a local herb as a form of escapism, and with the Puritans being hyper-sensitive about the influence of the Devil, from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump to being accused of witchcraft. And then as the finger-pointing and denials start flying, the family unit could get torn apart in the process.
Look, bad luck's going to happen, a crop's going to fail here and there, maybe there's not much food wandering by the cabin this week, and back then you couldn't just pop down to the corner store for bagels and cream cheese, everybody was living on the frontier. This family shown here left their colony to strike out on their own, maybe be the first ones to start a new town, and in so doing, they're out in the woods, surrounded by wild animals and who-knows-what. Maybe it's a little weird that the twins are claiming that their goat can talk, but hey, kids, what can you do? Twins are weird in general, that's for sure. It's probably a little more upsetting that young Caleb's trying to sneak a peek down his sister's blouse, but he's at that delicate age. Meanwhile Thomasin, who's supposed to be watching the twins, is also responsible for helping her father undress after he's been out hunting - yeah, that seems perfectly OK, no triggering behavior there.
I got pretty concerned after a while, because there just seemed to be a whole lot of nothing happening, and I thought that maybe this was the "Blair Witch Project" situation all over again. Remember that film? It was a shaki-cam "found footage" sensation back in the day, but eventually fans realized that in 80 minutes of movie, absolutely nothing happened. "The Witch" might be another slow burn, but eventually the excrement hits the fan, and the little grievances between the family members, combined with bad luck, cabin fever and paranoia all come to a head. Everybody suddenly accuses everybody else of consorting with the Devil, and it's a long downward spiral from there.
But then, what is reality? Maybe there really is a witch living out in the woods, maybe a whole coven of them, and this family (with no discernible last name) just picked a really bad corner of Colonial New England to move into. Sure, and maybe goats can really talk to kids. Who can say? Better to take those teen girls, tie them up and throw them in the river to see if they'll float, perhaps. Jesus, did we really DO that as a society? It's a wonder that anybody made it out of the 1600's, right? The good news was that for the next 200 years, there was a whole lot of space for us to fill, if you felt cramped up or overly repressed you just packed up and headed west, for someplace like Wyoming or Alaska where you could just build a little cabin, live your life just like you wanted to, and then go silently insane by yourself - or find a spouse, settle down and raise a family that could then fall completely apart later. And there were plenty of common enemies, like Native Americans and then later Nazis and Communists, for us all to agree on, that kept us pretty busy.
But it's still not a large leap from the Puritans of the 1630's to the conservatives and "Karens" of today. People who believe in religious freedom for themselves, but don't think that right should be extended to Muslims. People who signed off on a separation between church and state, yet keep trying to get the laws of our country to reflect Christian values, whatever that means. People who want the guvmint to not mandate vaccinations or mask-wearing to combat COVID, because it should be their bodies, their choice - but then they want to restrict reproductive rights for teens because somehow God told them that abortion is wrong. (But if their own daughter needed an abortion, that's totally different...). And they can't see the inherent contradictions and hypocritical positions that have resulted.
So oddly, we're kind of back where we started as Americans - you can't repress people and tell them what to do, what to think, how much to pay in taxes, without eventually causing some kind of riot. Or all those repressed feelings and naughty thoughts have to go SOMEWHERE, you can only suppress them for so long - and then all it takes is one invisible threat to tear the family, or the country, right down the middle. And all that just does NOT lead to good things.
Look, we can get really bogged down here discussing the nature of man, is there such thing as original sin or is it possible to resist all the world's temptations and live a meaningful life that is also, you know, somewhat interesting? Are humans in control of the world around them, or just pawns of the universe, subject to forces both earthly and other-worldly? Or, maybe this family's eldest daughter is just terrible at playing "Peek-a-boo" with a baby. That's possible, too.
Also starring Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Emma."), Ralph Ineson (last seen in "Dolittle"), Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings (last seen in "The Red Violin"), Bathsheba Garnett (last seen in "Mean Girls"), Sarah Stephens, Axtun Henry Dube, Athan Conrad Dube and the voice of Daniel Malik.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cords of chopped wood
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