The Witch (dir. Robert Eggers, 2015)
A family is exiled from their seventeenth century Puritan community in this New England fable after the father William (Ralph Ineson, better known as Chris Finch from The Office) apparently thought that things were getting a little too lax for his standards. He, his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their children now eke out a miserable existence in the woods consisting solely of work, prayer, and guilt. Their youngest, the baby Samuel, vanishes one day while the daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) was supposed to be watching him. They believe he was taken by a wolf. Other events keep happening. Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) encounters a young woman and is found delirious with fever. The family begins to believe witchcraft is responsible.
I don’t go into the woods. That’s where danger lives. It’s not just some urban logic imprinted on my brain. It’s an instinctual revulsion toward being in the forest. You can keep your romantic nonsense about trees and animals and the state of nature, because I know that everything out there wants me dead. In the city I can stay inside where it’s safe and there are books, an internet connection, and air conditioning: all the amenities of modern life that make it bearable.
This life that the Puritan family that William more or less forces them into because of his prideful refusal to comply with the still quite strict interpretation of Christianity is obviously terrible. Human beings are not meant to live in environments like these. This tiny family unit isn’t just at greater risk in their seclusion, it’s psychologically maladaptive. Even if there are witches in the woods, the family is clearly cracking up before then.
Much has been made of the choice offered at the film’s end: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” I don’t know a single person that wouldn’t be tempted by the promise of butter, let alone the possibility of a world beyond this glorified shack in the woods. Me, I wouldn’t even think about it. Sure, I’m not big about all the naked cavorting in the woods, but I’ll take that over being stranded in the wilderness. Human beings need communities, be they Puritan plantations or a witches coven. That’s the moral of this fable and, uh, I guess the ABC show Lost: live together or die alone.
October 26, 2018
oliveresque 