I don’t know what freedom costs. It’s an intangible concept—and maybe each of us has our own cost, our own point of discovery. I do know that sometimes we are driven to places we never thought ourselves capable of reaching, and it may not always be entirely clear if we willed it to happen or if it simply happened to us. Films are things that, in this way, just happen to us, but the best of them are in fact able to take you to that heretofore-unreachable space. That’s what Robert Eggers’ The Witch accomplishes.
With much of its dialogue taken verbatim from 17th-century New England documents, court records, and diaries, Eggers and his dedicated cast and crew immerse us in the oppressive Puritan environment that our family is beholden to, though exiled to the forest’s edge they may be. That’s what makes it so horrifyingly delightful when it eventually goes all the way, differentiating itself from other, similar stories based on the period that settle for metaphor (The Crucible comes to mind). Eggers’ past as a production designer is a clear asset throughout, crafting a truly authentic atmosphere in his directorial debut only to purposefully spoil it with the mystical and unnatural world.
That’s what makes the finale so glorious. But that aside, the fact that The Witch makes things explicit at all proves the implications to be even more interesting. This is a story of radicalization, as Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, the pulsating centre of the film) learns what the cost of her freedom must be under the repressive structures she found herself held down by. Though the film sometimes struggles to make us aware of what she may be thinking, it’s easy enough to understand that because she is taught to fear it, she is instead guided (persuaded?) toward discovering her own power. Who could blame her?
It’s not uncommon for the Final Girl, so to speak, to find empowerment after her ordeal, but rarely does it come as it does for Thomasin. Instead of finding the light after the darkness, she leaves one darkness for another and finds a sense of profound belonging for the first time. The ecstasy felt in those final minutes is that unreachable space made tangible, the realization that there is a way to harness your fear and control it rather than be suffocated by it.
