The actor:	Daniel Malik
The character:	Black Phillip
The film:	The Witch
The line:	“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

One of the foundational principles of this blog is that the elevated horror craze of the mid-2010s was deleterious to the way people approach genre films, and that just as importantly, most of the movies of said movement were just not very good.

This is not even close to a foundational principle here, but I’m worried about Robert Eggers. His last two films have been shot well, if not originally, and there’s a good case to be made that the cinematography of Jarin Blaschke is the best part of both The Lighthouse and The Northman. The Lighthouse was an anemic Persona; The Northman names its main character “Amleth” like we needed the help. His next movie is going to be a remake of his favorite movie, Nosferatu, and given how many like movies there have been in the wake of Murnau’s landmark, he can neither hope to break new ground nor hope to improve on the original.

In other words, it’s been nearly a decade since a stupendous debut film for Robert Eggers, one with quality I no longer expect to see in his pictures but still hope he’ll surprise me with. Make a list of the best compositions or sequences of Eggers’s career thus far and The Witch would dominate it: the rising goat preparing to strike, the crow pecking at a breast, the low camera following skipping twins, the empty blanket on the grass. And this scene towards the end too, the one where Black Phillip makes his offer.

It is so difficult to write a character, and then to write a story around a character, and then to make that character an innocent figure who things happen to. The initiating event of The Witch is the banishment of Thomasin’s family from the Puritan community because of her father’s refusal to belong meekly to the group. What begins the story in earnest is the kidnapping of her infant sibling from under her eyes, which one cannot blame her for even if one does believe in witches. Over and over again, things happen around Thomasin, and by the end of the picture everything has been stripped from her. No parents, no farm. Defending herself against her family, who has decided she is an evil person through circumstance even though she has comported herself well, she finds herself totally alone. Except for the presence of a demon. Maybe even the demon. She is out of choices, really. Either she can attempt to maintain some spiritual goodness as a feral Puritan, attempt to go back to the colony that will no longer accept her and beg for mercy, or, as she does, ask the devil for the dole.

For a movie which genuinely gets after issues of religion and spirituality, The Witch ends with Thomasin choosing material gains after witnessed days and unseen years of material loss. Butter is the first thing Black Phillip offers, which is such a wonderful place to begin, so simple and apt for a young woman who will never know what a bonbon or a Twinkie is. The pretty dress. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” After privations such as hers, why wouldstn’t she?