Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
Synopsis
A man is on trial in a Puritan early American court and judges. They don’t care for what he’s been preaching. The man and his family are banished. The family gets on their wagon and moves out of town into the wilderness. They find some land, build a cabin, and start farming.
The oldest daughter, Thomasin, is watching the baby, and the baby just suddenly vanishes. We see an old woman taking a knife to the baby and rubbing its blood all over herself. The family searches for days, but eventually, they have to give it up.
The father, William, and the son, Caleb, go hunting. They talk about whether the baby is in Heaven or Hell. They get chewed out by Katherine, the mother, for leaving the family alone when they return. Caleb keeps looking at Thomasin and having impure thoughts about her. The youngest daughter says she’s seen a witch in the woods. Thomasin pretends she’s the witch and gets more than a little carried away.
Katherine thinks they’re all going to starve over the winter, so William promises to take Thomasin back to town in the morning and leave her with another family. Caleb has an idea that will allow Thomasin to stay with them. The two of them head into he woods to check their animal traps. Thomasin falls off the horse and blacks out, and Caleb gets lost.
Caleb wanders through the thickest part of the woods and comes upon the home of the witch. She comes out and looks quite young. She tempts him for a kiss and pulls him closer…
William goes out in search for Caleb after he and Katherine fight over a simple lie. Katherine swears that they’re all doomed. Meanwhile, Thomasin finds Caleb outside, naked. The next morning, the goats are shooting out blood instead of milk. Katherine says it’s witchcraft, and William disagrees. Katherine just wants to go home to England.
Caleb pukes up a rotten apple, and the young twins accuse Thomasin of being a witch. They start faking being possessed, just like the kids in “The Crucible.” Caleb wakes up and is delirious for a minute and then dies. William and Katherine both think Thomasin did it; the evidence points to her being a witch. Thomasin blame their black goat, Black Phillip, the twins are always playing with.
William threatens to kill Jonas and Mercy, and they suddenly wake up in terror. William locks all three children and the goat in the barn. They find the old version of the witch in there in the middle of the night.
The next morning, William comes outside to find most of the goats dead and the barn torn apart. He’s attacked by Black Phillip and possibly killed. Katherine attacks Thomasin, blaming her for everything. Katherine chokes Thomasin until Thomasin kills Katherine with a shovel.
The night, Thomasin goes out to the barn and speaks with Black Phillip. He answers and asks what she wants. She asks what he wants in return, and he wants her to sign his book. She signs the book and walks off into he dark woods with the goat. She comes up a whole group of witches, dancing around the fire. The witches start to fly, and Thomasin does it as well. She starts to laugh…
Commentary
You’ll almost certainly need the subtitles turns on for this one, as they use period-sounding English for all the dialog, and it’s really, really hard to understand at times.
That said, the attention to period detail is really nice here. They’re obsessed with religion and their curse as sinners. It’s all their own fault, or so they think. It’s dark, gloomy, and very grim, probably exactly like what life was really like for the Puritans.
The whole story is essentially “The Crucible,” only limited to a family of six isolated out in the woods, and it ends just about as well. It looks good, it’s very well acted, the creepy factor is turned way up, but it is a very slow burn, and not much actually, really happens until the end.