The Witch

The film begins with banishment. William and his family are expelled from the Puritan plantation for the sin of pride — he believes himself more righteous than the community. They settle at the edge of the wilderness, alone, exposed to what lives in the trees.

This is the structural setup for every initiation: separation from the ordinary world. But the family does not know they have entered initiatory space. They think they are simply farming. They do not understand that the forest is a threshold, that thresholds have guardians, and that guardians exact prices.

Thomasin is on the edge of womanhood. Her body is changing; her mother sees her as a threat; her father's authority is crumbling. She is the member of the family most exposed to what is coming because she is the one already in transition.

The witch in the woods takes baby Samuel in the first act. She is real — Eggers shows her, naked, bloody, grinding the infant into flying ointment. This is not ambiguity. This is not 'maybe it is all in their heads.' Evil exists. It acts. It hunts.

But the film's question is not whether the witch is evil. The question is why her offer, when it finally comes, is the only offer that makes sense.

The Puritans brought something specific to New England: a terror of feminine power. Women's bodies, women's sexuality, women's knowing — all were suspect, all required control, all could be the doorway through which Satan entered the community.

Thomasin's body is the site of this terror. Her mother looks at her with suspicion as her daughter becomes beautiful. The film is shot to place Thomasin's developing body always in the frame's consciousness — not exploitatively, but diagnostically. The family cannot stop looking at what she is becoming. They cannot stop fearing it.

The historical witchcraft accusations were almost always about women who did not fit: women who were too old, too independent, too knowing, too sexual. The witch hunts were not about finding evil. They were about destroying feminine power that could not be contained by marriage, submission, or silence.

The witch in the woods is what Puritan culture created by opposition. She is feminine power unbound — naked, powerful, flying, killing. She is everything the Puritans said women must not be. And she is real, in the world of the film, because that power is real. Deny it, and it goes into the forest. It does not disappear.

Thomasin becomes what her family feared because her family gave her no other way to become anything. The witch is not born evil. She is manufactured by cultures that cannot hold feminine power and so create the conditions for its return in shadow form.

Eggers did something unprecedented: he made a film that takes Early Modern witchcraft beliefs seriously. The flying ointment, the familiar spirits, the coven in the woods, the signing of the Devil's book — these are not Hollywood inventions. They are the actual beliefs of the actual Puritans, rendered without winking distance.

This authenticity extends to the religion. William's Christianity is not a strawman. His prayers are genuine. His faith is real. The film does not mock the Puritans for being religious; it shows them as people who genuinely believe they are in a cosmic war and are losing.

Black Phillip is not a cartoonish devil. He is the Devil as the Early Modern period understood him: seductive, patient, offering real power in exchange for the soul. When he speaks to Thomasin, he does not lie. He offers what he says he will offer. Live deliciously. Have butter and a pretty dress. Leave the edge of the forest that has destroyed everyone you love.

The coven at the end is not punishment. It is community — the first genuine community Thomasin has been offered. She rises with the other witches, laughing. Whatever she has lost, she has gained something her family never gave her: a place where her power is not only permitted but celebrated.

The Witch does not ask you to approve of Thomasin's choice. It asks you to understand why she made it. In a world where her only options were submission, accusation, and death, she chose the path that offered life — even if that life is called damnation.

This is the film's radical honesty. It does not pretend the witch's path is safe or good. It does not romanticize what Thomasin joins. But it also does not pretend that the Puritan alternative was anything but a different kind of death — slower, quieter, and called holy.

The patriarchal response to this film is predictable: See? This is why we must control women's power. Look what happens when they get free. But the film's actual argument is the opposite: This is what happens when you deny power any legitimate expression. It does not disappear. It goes into the forest. And then it comes back.

Thomasin's ascension is not triumph. It is tragedy — the tragedy of a culture that could only see her becoming as threat, her body as danger, her selfhood as sin. She did not want to be a witch. She wanted to be someone. The witch was the only someone left.

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? The question hangs over the film and over every system that offers women nothing and then blames them for taking what is offered from other sources. The Devil does not create witches. Patriarchy creates witches. The Devil merely employs them.

In the morning light, the coven rises. Thomasin rises with them. She is free. She is damned. She is finally, completely herself. And the forest holds what the settlement could not — the power of the feminine, ascending, terrible, alive.