Outside of a Dream, Episode 2 - The Witch

A24

In the early 17th century, a Puritan family, recently exiled from their colony in Massachusetts, build their home at the edge of the wild, unwittingly trespassing on the territory of a witch. The wood's resident crone is less your Margaret Hamilton, "I'll get you my pretty" type and more a nightmarish servant of literal Satan. Yet the witch herself is only the catalyst for the actual conflict, which is the paranoia and zealous fervour that starts to rip the family apart. Tuck yourself in for Robert Eggers' The Witch.

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Theme music is "Deep Blue" by Bensound, found at https://www.bensound.com/

Review: The Witch

All photos courtesy of A24

When the family comes across the clearing at the edge of the woods, they fall to their knees and pray, mother and father holding their hands aloft. Pious exiles, this Puritan clan—father William, mother Katherine, and children Thomasin, Caleb, Mercy, Jonas and, soon, baby Samuel—has found true salvation far away from both oppressive England and their compromising Puritan community. It will be a hard life, but a pure and righteous one.

But someone else has already staked a claim on this wilderness. She lives by herself in a shack deep in the thicket, occasionally wearing a red riding cloak that looks lifted directly from the pages of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. She is a witch, but not the cackling, green-skinned variety of The Wizard of Oz or a verbose, compassionate intellectual in the vein of Hermione Granger. There is something much more primal and elemental to this crone, and when she’s done working her unspeakable magic the family at her doorstep will be at each other’s throats.