The Witch

The horror is the household

A witch exists in this film. She is real, she takes the baby, and the film is not interested in making you doubt it. What the film is interested in is the hundred minutes between the taking and the ending, during which a family of seven dismantles itself with no supernatural assistance whatsoever.

William cannot farm, cannot admit it, and sells his wife's silver cup to buy a hunting trap he is too proud to mention. Katherine grieves in a way that curdles into blame. The twins are unbearable in the specific way that small children are unbearable, and they are the ones who name Thomasin as a witch, and they are believed. By the time anything overtly supernatural happens to the family, the family is already over.

That is the film's argument: a community that believes a daughter might be a witch will produce one.

The research is the atmosphere

Eggers built the dialogue out of period journals, trial records and pamphlets, and then asked actors to deliver it straight. It is initially impenetrable and then, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, it stops being a costume and becomes the only possible way these people could speak. Ralph Ineson's voice does half the work — a man praying in a register that is already a death rattle.

Everything else is correspondingly austere: natural light, a farm built to the period, no score in the conventional sense but Mark Korven's scraped and sawed strings, which sound less like music than like something being tuned in the next field. Anya Taylor-Joy, in her first lead, has to carry a film in which almost every other character is accusing her, and does it mostly with her face.

Where it divides people

The Witch was sold as terrifying and is not, in the jump-out sense, frightening at all. It is oppressive. The dread is domestic, theological and cumulative, and if you do not find a Puritan family arguing about grace inherently tense then there is a long stretch here where very little occurs.

It also arguably overcommits to Caleb. His seduction and death are the one place where the film reaches for conventional horror imagery, and the register wobbles — a film this disciplined about restraint suddenly showing you a thing in a cloak.

But the ending is close to perfect, and it is perfect because of all that austerity. A hundred minutes of a girl being told what she is, and then a goat asks her a question.

The short answer: everyone in the family is dead except Thomasin. She kills her mother in self-defence, is left alone on the ruined farm, and speaks to Black Phillip, who answers her in a man's voice and asks whether she would like to live deliciously. She signs her name in his book, walks naked into the wood, joins a coven around a fire, and rises laughing above the trees.

Here is the chain.

What happens to the baby, Samuel?

Samuel is taken by the witch in the wood. This happens early and is never in doubt — the film shows the witch's hands. The family's refusal to accept a supernatural explanation is what starts the collapse.

Why is Thomasin accused of witchcraft?

The twins accuse her, and nobody defends her. Mercy and Jonas name her as a witch, first as a game. Katherine takes it up. William, who has already lied about the silver cup and his own competence, trades his daughter's reputation rather than admit anything.

What happens to Caleb?

Caleb is seduced and dies, and Thomasin is blamed. He encounters the witch as a young woman in the wood, returns ruined, and dies praying. The twins' accusation hardens into the family's explanation.

Who kills William?

William is killed by Black Phillip. The goat gores him against the collapsing woodpile — the one moment where the film confirms what Phillip is before the final scene.

Why does Thomasin kill her mother?

Katherine attacks her first. Driven past reason and having seen a vision of nursing Samuel, Katherine tries to strangle her daughter. Thomasin takes up a billhook. It is self-defence and the film stages it as such.

What does Black Phillip say to Thomasin?

Black Phillip speaks. Thomasin addresses the goat the way the twins claimed to, and it answers: a man's voice, asking what she wants of life, offering butter, pretty dresses, the world. She asks it to guide her hand, signs the book she cannot read, and goes into the wood.

What does the ending of The Witch mean?

The film's last line of dialogue is a question about pleasure, and that is the point. Thomasin has spent the entire film being told she is wicked by everyone with authority over her — father, mother, siblings, scripture. The coven is the first thing in her life to offer her anything. The ascent is shot as rapture, with Korven's strings turning into something like a choir, and Thomasin laughs.

That is why the ending unsettles rather than satisfies. It is a horror film in which the devil is real, the witchcraft is real, and the damnation is still the best offer the girl ever received. The family's Puritanism did not protect her from the wood. It delivered her to it.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean for a viewer.

Tone 008 is the signature. Only 11 works in the index are bleaker, and only 2 films — Martyrs at 003 and Possession at 006. It shares its 008 with Hereditary, and the two are a useful pair: Hereditary is bleak because the family never had a choice, The Witch is bleak because they did and chose this.

Pace 018 is slower than almost anything we score. Only 18 works in the index sit lower, and only 7 films. This is a 92-minute film in which the first overt horror beat after the opening is close to forty minutes away. If pacing is where you lose patience, lose it here rather than halfway.

Viscera 038 is well below the median. 44 works score lower, but the index median film is 044, so this is a restrained film by our measure — two or three hard images, mostly brief, and the worst of them involving a goat and a woodpile.

Threat 030 puts it on the supernatural side, which is the honest reading. The witch is real and the devil speaks. But note how high the human damage runs anyway: everything that destroys this family is done by its members.

Era bias 078 is the surprise. 70 works score lower, meaning The Witch reads as modern craft rather than analog texture despite being set in 1630. It is shot clean, with natural light and digital clarity. It is a contemporary film about the past, not a film pretending to be from the past.

On jump scares: two, maybe three, and none of them cheap. The fear here is theological and domestic. Nothing chases anyone.