The VVitch
Why I watched it? My girlfriend and I were together on Halloween. We wanted to watch a scary movie. But we had a problem, my girlfriend gets scared a bit more easily by the new style horror movies so it got a bit more difficult to choose a film. So we were tracking through our watch lists and we came across The Witch. The trailer captivated my attention when i watched it a few months before. It had a realistic eeriness about it. I had her watch the trailer and we decided on The Witch.
Summary! In The Witch you are sucked in the life of a 1700’s New England family of husband and wife with 5 children. In an age where Witches were just as real as you or me to the world. The family is extremely religious. So religious so, that they are threatened with banishment from the Puration settlement where they lived. They decide to try it on their own and leave the settlement to start a farm. On this new farm the eldest daughter is one day given the task to keep watch on the baby, but the baby gets taken in the blink of an eye and the daughter is blamed. After that things start to escalate. The Reason! But why watch this movie? To me it feels real, the characters, setting, the way they talk and behave all feel really realistic. No archetypes of classic horror characters but real people with real problems they would face in 1700’s New England.
But it’s still a horror story right? So why watch it, it probably full with the standard horror story tropes! No it’s really not. In recent years Jump Scares started to be all the rage. But surprisingly, this movie has a serious lack of those. The absence of jump scares doesn’t make it less scary, in my opinion it makes it even scarier. My thought behind it is that when you jump out of your seat from a jump scare all that tension that the film is trying to build up will leave your body. When this keeps happening throughout the film it will result in a weak climax at the end and you will feel let down. In The Witch that doesn’t happen. The Family gets in more trouble every minute.The movie keeps building the feeling that something is serious wrong, you empathize with almost every character and understand their actions. It works more on a psychological level. The constant feel that something just isn’t right is haunting.
The visuals are breathtaking and some scenes are really disturbing. The feeling i got was simmilar to how i felt while watching (The Antichrist). It shocks you without the need for random heavy sound effects and explicit gore. Something bad? Every film has it’s flaws and for me it was the ending (SPOILER ALERT). I’m really split in this because on one side I really liked the ending, on the other hand it really left me unfulfilled. I did not see the ending coming, I really liked that. But it felt not true to the character of Thomasin. She tries so hard the whole movie to show and tell her family that she is good, and in the end she simply turns to Satan? Maybe this was the straw that broke the camel's back and she just says fuck it? In the whole film she is told that she is a witch, maybe she just accepted that as the truth. All is possible in my opinion. The fun thing is you can think of your own reasons why a movie ended the way it did. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same as the director stated because thinking and trying to find out why things went how they went is one of the things why stories and movies are so great.
Hopefully i have given you a reason to watch this strange, cool take on a story that is told too death. And please tell me what you think of it, and my blog. i want all feedback! For me this is just trying to think more about the films i watch and at the same time spread knowledge of films i liked and you may have missed.