The VVitch: Grim Fairy Tales

So here’s the thing about fairytales: As quaint and cutesy as they might be in the modern day, they were, like fables, originally cautionary in nature, a product of a time largely uninformed by science and reliant on the oral tradition. The versions we get today are largely sanitized, with happy endings, the original blood and gore toned down, and rendered less upsetting by the distance that the modern age brings to stories from another time. But once upon a time (heh), fairytales, like fables, were intended to scare the shit out of impressionable children, using the dangers of the world they lived in to reinforce the things they needed to know to stay alive.

The VVitch (subtitled A New England Fairytale) is a very well-done example of what a fairytale might look like returned to its original, awful power.

The year is 1630, and William - along with his wife Katherine, oldest daughter Thomasin, middle son Caleb, young twins Mercy and Jonas, and baby Samuel - stands accused by the plantation government of practicing his religion in a manner unsuited to the community. William, unwilling to live someplace he perceives to have abandoned Christ’s true gospel, packs up his family and moves out into the wilderness where they can make a home of their own.

But there’s a cost to this. Leaving the plantation behind means leaving the comfort of community behind - doctors, reliable shelter, food stores to get through the lean times. It was a time when shunning or excommunication carried a real potential cost to survival, and as it transpires, William and his family are having a hard time of it. Their corn crop is meager and won’t last them through the winter, the traps he bought with Katherine’s heirloom silver cup aren’t catching any animals, the chickens aren’t laying good eggs, they have nothing to sell or trade. Starvation is looming.

But still, life goes on. What crops they have get tended. The goats have to be herded back into their pen after Mercy and Jonas let them out. Thomasin keeps an eye on baby Samuel while Katherine works. Thomasin plays peek-a-boo with Samuel, and Samuel giggles with delight as Thomasin covers her face…

..and then when she pulls her hands away, Samuel is gone.

This is the inciting event, as quick and sudden as lightning, that begins a long, dark unraveling of this one family, trying to make it on their own in the wilds of the New World. William’s family (we never learn their surname) is under tremendous strain from multiple directions at once. They are already struggling to survive, and must also to contend with a child missing (and good as dead) on top of their rapidly dwindling food supply and a Calvinist version of Christianity in which they are forever unworthy. condemned from birth to irreconcilable sin and corruption, only to be granted grace if an unknowable God so chooses. Their faith is so constraining that its weight presses down upon the film, its demands hanging over every conversation, every scene like the brooding storm clouds ever-present above the tree line. 

This, then, is a world in which the presence of a remote, unknowable God is almost physically palpable to these people, and so is also the presence of evil. This was a time when supernatural explanations for events were more likely than scientific ones, when people understood the world through scripture and fairytales. This is how William and his family understand the world and their place in it, and when you’re facing isolation, slow starvation, and the death of your youngest child, and your best explanation is unavoidable sin, corruption, and the presence of literal evil in the form of the Devil and witchcraft, things are gonna go wrong pretty fast.

And they do. There are a lot of secrets in this family - William’s keeping secrets from Katherine, Katherine’s keeping secrets from William, William’s asking Caleb to lie to spare his mother, Caleb swears Thomasin to secrecy, and meanwhile, Jonas and Mercy are running around being awful little shits and stirring up trouble at every opportunity. As things go from bad to worse, everyone basically turns on each other - everyone blames Thomasin because she was the last to see Samuel and they resent her, and she resents them for blaming her when they all have their own failings and hypocrisies. Much like Hereditary, nobody really communicates with anyone else, and this is evil’s way in - fracture the family, drive them apart, make them vulnerable to evil’s influence.

Also, much like Hereditary, the supernatural is behind what appear to be natural misfortunes, though here everyone’s more willing to accept the supernatural as a possibility - but it’s their own human frailties that cause them to misunderstand where evil actually lies and blinds them to its actual presence. The Devil preys upon desire, tells people what they want to hear, and this makes them receptive. Once the door is open, the Devil finds his way in and takes what he wants. Both films deal with the ways in which natural secrets and familial dysfunction let supernatural evil in, and how our own flaws and failings blind us to its influence until it’s too late, but Hereditary takes place in a modern, rational world that denies the supernatural, and The VVitch takes place in a world that acknowledges and fears the supernatural. And yet, it doesn’t matter in the end.

And this is what makes it deeply tragic as well as scary. The family is largely sympathetic - William is a decent, goodhearted man, not cruel or abusive, he does things for the right reasons, but as often is the case, they backfire. For as much as he excoriates himself for the sin of pride, when it comes down to it, he can set it aside for the sake of his family. Katherine is maybe less sympathetic, but believably so, given that she’s left her home in England and all its comforts (at one point, Thomasin reminisces about having a home with glass windows, and Caleb can’t even remember it) to follow her husband into the untamed wilds of a foreign country, and it’s largely brought her nothing but misery. Thomasin and Caleb are decent kids with realistic fears and worries given their worldview (there’s an especially heartfelt sequence where Caleb tearfully interrogates his father on the nature of grace because he’s afraid his little brother has gone to hell and that’s a lot to put on a kid his age), but there’s only so much scapegoating Thomasin can take. They’re people, not caricatures, and though the dialogue threatens to tip over into affectation occasionally, it’s generally on point (and historically sourced, apparently, which helps). As non-contemporary periods go, it’s pretty well-realized, and these are believable people with accessible, understandable hopes and fears and frustrations.

And all of this is beautifully shot - impenetrably dark forests, cloudy, overcast skies looming over everything, everything gray and bleak. The score is all ambient hum and chimes and dissonant strings building to hysteric crescendo, followed by sudden drops into silence and though it’s well-executed, it tries a little too hard sometimes to underscore what we’re seeing. The sound design, however, is excellent and pays off extremely well at the end.  It’s all paced for a slow burn - very quiet, restrained and deliberate, set up almost as vignettes rather than one continuous story, and though the slow pace threatens to bog the film down in the middle, the way it shifts attention back and forth between the natural misfortune and family conflict and the supernatural omens and portents of black magic’s presence, it keeps moving and inexorably dials up the bad shit until the very end. It’s an end that you’ll probably see coming, but to its credit, it feels less predictable and more just dreadfully inevitable. The Devil is patient. The Devil plays the long game. The Devil was there all along, hiding in plain sight.

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