In cinemas March 11

Directed by Robert Eggers.
Starring Anna Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger.
92 mins.

There’s a reason tales of witches and poltergeists tend to orbit around young women. The Witch will show you why.

Robert Eggers’ remarkable debut is deeply unsettling portrayal of paranoia, torment and repression in an isolated Puritan family. More arthouse psychological thriller than scare-and-shock horror, it may alienate some viewers. Those who give it their time will find the effort worthwhile.

Banished for heresy, a New England family struggle with isolation, the threat of starvation, and dangerous tensions within their relationships. Patriarch William is proud and overbearing, and his wife Kate is broken inside from wounds she does not fully comprehend. The gendered power dynamics between husband and wife also loom over their children, teenage daughter Thomasin and her pubescent brother Caleb.

When baby Samuel is snatched away, Thomasin is accused of witchcraft, and as goats lactate blood, cracked eggs reveal embryos and crops fail, nature reveals the social nightmares of women’s sexual maturity. All the while, the dark woods issue a siren call. There may be witches in the woods, but in the house, there are women, and there is power. And Eggers shows how this can strike fear into us more deeply than anything.

4/5