A Puritan family is banished from their New England plantation over a religious dispute and forced to build a new life at the edge of an unmapped forest.
The film shows its hand early: within the first few minutes the audience knows something in those woods is real. The family does not. When their infant vanishes during a game of peekaboo with eldest daughter Thomasin, suspicion turns inward, and the parents and siblings start blaming each other, and blaming her, while the viewer watches them look in the wrong direction. Robert Eggers sets up a slow-burn crisis of faith rather than a chase or a haunting, and the horror comes from how completely a family can turn on itself when it believes God has.
Eggers spent roughly four years researching the film with historians and museums, and much of the dialogue is not invented but drawn directly from period sources: 17th-century court records, diaries and religious tracts from the witch-trial era. He and his team cataloged phrases from these documents and worked them into the script, giving the family's speech its clipped, archaic, King James cadence, and insisted on building with period-accurate carpentry and thatching, using only candlelight and natural light on set.
The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where its director won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award before A24 picked it up and built its now-familiar brand of unsettling, patient horror around it. Anya Taylor-Joy, in her feature debut as Thomasin, carries the film's tonal shift from wary teenager to something harder to name, while Ralph Ineson's father and Kate Dickie's mother play the collapse of authority and faith with a heaviness that never tips into camp. It is the film that made elevated horror a usable term for American genre filmmaking, for better and worse.
At 92 minutes, The Witch is a tight, single-sitting watch, best suited to a quiet night rather than a distracted one, since so much of its tension is built through sound and stillness rather than event. It is streaming on HBO Max in the US.
