My review of the VVitch
(Spoilers)
Damn. It lived upto my expectations. For one, the movie is beautiful. The props, locations, shots, all of it is gorgeous. The attention to detail.
The film is slow. Enough to keep some people bored (not this guy though), as the films suspense is a slow burn that suddenly flares up near the end. It’s not horror in the typical sense, but an unnerving experience into what one might think would be a puritans worst nightmare, boring and macabre alike.
Finally, as a traditional witch myself, the folkloric bits in the film caught me off guard. I felt like I may have been the only one in the theater who may have understood the implications of the more diabolical imagery. Things like the Hare (lifted straight out of the lore of Isobell Gowdie and a certain American witch), the familiar spirit feeding from the mothers teat, etc.
The witch, are dark, diabolical, haggard, seductive. From early on you know what she’s capable of and her unsettling frame a proper Hag, old and baring all, feasting on babes, and applying a flying ointment with a broom. There was a guy in the theater who groaned in the first scene with here
Her seduction of Celeb is a fine theme, as he early on sneaks glances at his sister, raised in the Puritan worldview. Thomasin is a fantastic character, and the film serves to uplift her from the patriarchal society she’s forced into, and ultimately seduced by the goat, Black Phillip.
Black Phillip serves as a creepily alluded to mention, by the twins of the family. They say he speaks in whispers, and even early on his presence, without the pretense of anything supernatural, is unsettling.
It is when the family is finally done turning upon another, does Black Phillip really astound.
Thomasin conjures him directly, to whist there is no reply, for a few seconds wait. Then he speaks out of frame, the most eerily similar and seductive voice, asking “Wouldst Thou like to live Deliciously?”, in a way that made me almost laugh. Laugh in the way that you recognize a voice. My own experiences with the Devil. And made everyone else in the theater curse or gasp.
To go on, the speaking goat is something straight out of a fairytale, and he suddenly becomes the fabled “Man in Black” and asks Thomasin to sign his black book, and when she replies she cannot write her name, he tells her “I will guide your hand”.
As a witch of the more folkloric nature, my euphoria and glee is not too unreasonable. The rightness of the wrongness, is how I would phrase it. You know these witches are evil, yet can’t help but cheer Thomasins decent into it as she rejects the oppressive norms of the Puritan society.
Overall, this may be one of my favorite depictions of witches as of late, right alongside the TV show, Salem.
#teamblackphillip #BlackPhillipforbestsupportingactor
If I remember correctly, Thomasin asked him to speak 3 times, before Black Phillip actually spoke. That is a huge theme in a lot of witchy folklore when it comes to spirit initiation, flying to the sabbat, and calling spirits.
The amount of detail this movie had with all the folklore is just fantastic and amazing <3 lots of tiny details that make it so much better
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