The Witch (2015) is Robert Eggers' debut feature, and it arrives fully formed. There's no learning curve on display, no rough edges that signal a first-time director finding his feet. Eggers shot a film so assured in its dread, so precise in its period detail, that it immediately placed itself alongside the best folk horror ever committed to screen. This review argues it belongs in that conversation permanently.
What the film is actually about
Set in 1630s New England, The Witch follows a Puritan family exiled from their plantation community for reasons of religious pride. They settle at the edge of a vast, dark forest and begin to fall apart. The baby disappears first. Then the crops fail. Then the twins start whispering to the family's black goat, Black Phillip, as though something is answering back.
Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) sits at the centre of it all. She's the eldest daughter, old enough to be accused, young enough to be powerless. The film watches her with the same cold patience it watches everything else. Eggers doesn't push her into the horror; he lets the horror grow around her like mold on bread.
The family's faith is the real subject. These are people who believe in a literal devil, a literal God, and a literal damnation. The film respects that belief completely. It doesn't condescend to them or to the audience. When something supernatural happens, it happens plainly, without a sting on the soundtrack to tell you how to feel.
Robert Eggers' direction and period craft
Eggers researched the film obsessively, drawing on firsthand accounts of 17th-century New England life, witch trial testimonies, and folk tales of the period. The dialogue is sourced directly from historical documents. Characters say things like "wouldst thou like to live deliciously?" and it doesn't read as affectation. It reads as something ancient and specific.
The cinematography, shot by Jarin Blaschke, uses only natural light. Interiors are lit by firelight and candle. The forest is always grey, always flat, always waiting. The effect is that the film feels genuinely cold, genuinely 1630. It's the same commitment to period texture that would define Eggers' later work, including The Witch's A24 release, which gave it one of the most effective marketing campaigns in recent horror history ("A New England Folktale" stamped across the poster like a court document).
Mark Korven's score deserves its own sentence. It uses strings, brass, and choir in combinations that feel like religious music turned inside out. The sound design alone would carry the film halfway to hell.
Anya Taylor-Joy's performance
Anya Taylor-Joy was 18 when The Witch was shot. The performance she delivers should not be possible at that age. Thomasin is terrified, defiant, exhausted, and finally something else entirely, and Taylor-Joy holds all of it without tipping into melodrama. Her face does most of the work. Eggers keeps the camera close.
The supporting cast matches her. Ralph Ineson plays the father, William, as a man so committed to his own righteousness that he can't see his family dissolving around him. Kate Dickie as the mother Katherine is grief and suspicion given a human body. The twins are genuinely unsettling. Every performance sits inside the film rather than on top of it.
How it compares to other folk horror classics
The Witch sits in the same tradition as The Wicker Man (1973), another film that uses landscape and religious belief as instruments of dread. Both films understand that the most effective horror is the kind that feels like it could be true inside the logic of the world it builds. Neither film blinks. Both end in a place the audience can't quite follow and can't quite leave behind.
It also shares DNA with Hereditary (2018) in the way it uses family grief as the substrate for something supernatural. Both films treat the horror as an answer to emotional devastation, something that moves in when love can't hold the walls up anymore. Eggers got there first.
What separates The Witch from most of its peers is discipline. The film withholds. It shows you the witch once, briefly, early on, and then hides her again. It trusts the audience to carry the image. It doesn't explain the forest or what lives in it. It simply places the family at the tree line and watches.
The ending and what it means
The final 10 minutes of The Witch divide viewers more sharply than almost anything in recent horror. Without detailing what happens: Thomasin makes a choice. The film treats that choice as liberation. Whether you read it as tragedy or triumph determines almost everything about how the film sits with you afterward.
Eggers has said he wanted the ending to feel earned within the rules of the world the film had built. It does. Black Phillip delivers on the film's promise with complete seriousness. The last shot is one of the most striking images in 21st-century horror. Dread gives way to something stranger and harder to name.
Verdict
The Witch (2015) is a 93-minute argument for what folk horror can do when a director refuses to compromise. It's cold, specific, historically grounded, and genuinely frightening. Anya Taylor-Joy announces herself as a major screen presence. Robert Eggers announces himself as a filmmaker who arrived knowing exactly what he was doing. The forest is dark, and whatever lives in it has been waiting a long time.
Rating: 5 out of 5.