"The Witch" set off a small craze at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, and this craze continued until the beginning of 2016, even under the pressure of "Deadpool", it took Under the good box office results.
And this film is only director Robert Eggers' debut. In fact, the plot of the film is very simple. The story takes place in New Zealand in the 1630s. As a Puritan in a plantation, he was unable to communicate with the church's practices and was deported to a barren land.
Before going to the movies, understanding the concept of "puritans" can also help the overall understanding of the film. Puritans, it's a tendency, it's an attitude.
Compared with other believers, this type of believers pay more attention to teaching and preaching (so they have conflicts with the church), advocating nature (the whole family worshiped the forest when they first went to the barren land), and fearing death (in the When the eldest son prayed), worried that he was not redeemed (the whole film has been praying and repenting of his original sin).
The above four points are also the whole life attitude of this family throughout the whole process.
The director himself is a diehard fan of Kubrick and Bergman. From this film, I can feel the taste of Kubrick's "The Shining" the most, and at the end, maybe I still don't know which one is true and which one is true. is fantasy.
In order to emphasize the blurred confrontation between reality and fantasy in religion in New England, the film also has many allusions to fairy tales. For example, where parents discuss abandoning their children, it is a follow-up to "Hansel and Gretel", and then the figure wearing a red cloak walking through the forest is the best tribute to "Little Red Riding Hood".
And these truths and illusions have actually been spied from the title of the film. "The VVitch", a combination of two "Vs", looks like a "W" at first glance.
So is it "VVitch" or "Witch"? Do witches really exist?
When proving the existence of witches, it can actually be found from every detail that, for the "puritans", even if they prayed to God for their original sin almost all the time, none of this family were qualified "puritans".
The role of the father, in that era of patriarchy, his words and even the beliefs of the entire family. His wife also prayed for him every day before going to bed. At the same time, the only ritual prayer took place at the dinner table. The director's camera showed the whole family, and the father raised his hands like a god. In the whole shot, the eldest daughter is also the only back shot. (More on this later)
And he is also a liar in his family. At the beginning of the film, his father said that he sold the silver cup, but in the final shot, the silver cup is still at home.
The role of the mother has always been a devout believer. But in the family, it seems that she has always had the right to speak, but in fact she is still a cowardly female character who relies on her husband. At the same time, this female character is full of tragedies, and the preference for sons over women is a tone set in the whole tragedy, and even after several unfortunate things happened at home, she even tried to send her daughter out.
The eldest son, although he seems to be a more reliable person in the family. However, he is also the epitome of desire in the entire family. At the age of just enlightenment, I have repeatedly peeped at my sister's breasts, and these incestuous actions are slowly foreshadowing. In the later period, in the forest, he was thrown into the arms of the gorgeous and fragrant "witch".
In addition to the desire for color, there is also the desire for things. When he and his mother lied and went into the forest, he casually said about the apple tree he saw, and before he finally died, his father also pried out an apple from his mouth. Of course, returning to lust, Apple also alludes to Adam in religion, the temptation from the forbidden fruit.
The twins are undoubtedly the two most annoying characters in the film. Talkative, lazy, arrogant, selfish...is the greatest collection of sins of all kinds. He was also the first person to be "excluded" from God.
The eldest daughter, this central figure. From the beginning of the film, the first shot of her is her, which is a metaphor for her importance, and then after leaving the plantation, her shots begin to gradually decrease, more of the back and side view, until she finally walks to the forest, she The close-ups began to increase again. And she is the only one who is guided by the black goat - "God" (Satan).
First, let's make an assumption.
Witches exist.
From the film, the witch appears only 3 times.
The first time was to steal the youngest son, and then perform a "dissection" on the unpurified baby through a certain ritual, and then smear blood clots on his body under the full moon and night to complete his own "purification".
In addition to the appearance of the witch's body, the proof this time is through the appearance of symbolic objects of witches such as ravens and dead branches.
The second time is when the eldest son is lost in the forest. At this time, the witch has become a young woman and walked out of the house through the first "purification".
At this time, although the "young woman" has a fragrant body, the audience already understands when her bony hand is stretched out.
The third time the witch appeared, it was in the sheepfold. Come down from the roof and suck the "milk" of the white goat.
Except for three very obvious real bodies, the witch has never appeared again. But there have been countless occurrences of three highly representative animals, the hare, the black goat, and the raven.
Especially the hare and the black goat, these two animals appear outside the witches more often. In addition to representing Easter in Western religions, the rabbit also has a metaphor, which represents the sin and lust in the "Seven Deadly Sins". Like the black goat, it is Satan's assistant.
At the same time, the mother's illusion is also a good proof of the existence of witches. And there, the more interesting can be understood that the mother is more like a witch's clone. In Western religions, one place to identify witches is - the breasts.
A witch usually has multiple breasts to feed her witch animal, the raven in the movie.
As for the daughter who finally embarked on the path of a witch, there is actually a very strange rhythm of the voice. It was at the end that the father got up to look at the children in the sheepfold. Before that, there was almost a second of black mirror, and there was a female moan from outside the camera. In religion, virgins also gradually became witches after having sex with Satan. At the end of the film itself, led by the black goat, walked into the forest and completed her "ascension" ceremony.
But let's think about it from a different angle.
What if witches didn't exist?
In the history of England, there has been a large "witch incident". At that time, because a pastor's daughter had a strange disease, and the cause could not be found, everyone began to think that it was a curse from Satan.
Even in the end, the whole incident evolved into an incident in which women with various duties were witches. At that time, various punishments were taken against all the accused "witches".
And the historical background of the film happened in that era. We assume in a backwards fashion, where the eldest daughter ends up going mad and everything is an illusion, forced to be a "witch" by this reality, as it was at the time.
How did the little boy disappear? Just like she "scares" her twin sister because she is jealous of her mother's ignorance of her and her preference for her younger siblings.
So how did the eldest son die? It was obviously caused by eating poisoned apples by mistake, and his clothes were gone, and from his scars, he could guess that he might have passed through the thorns in the forest. And his hazy sexual concept can also be deduced that only in his eyes, the "witch" is a young woman of a young age.
Of course, the hallucinations produced by the poisoned apples also explain the last words before death.
A mother's hallucination. After losing two children in a row, the mother also began to get sick, and the fantasy caused by the illness can also be explained, and in this fantasy, all the people and things that the mother was obsessed with came back, the silver cup, the eldest son, the younger son, all All are back.
At the time, the mother had hallucinations because of illness. At the same time, she did not end her breastfeeding period, so the physiological increase in milk and blood also explained why she only had blood in her breasts, instead of being pecked by ravens. bloody.
In fact, in the film, only two people have never seen the "witch", and their deaths are also the most intuitive in the film. That is father and mother.
Unnatural death of twins. The twins have been playing selfish, lazy, arrogant roles in the film, and they have also angered the eldest daughter several times with their words and actions. That night was also an important node in the split of the eldest daughter.
Most importantly, don't forget that before the last eldest daughter "ascension", a bunch of witches were performing ritual summons. But in the end, she was the only one left.
As said at the beginning of the article, during the only successful prayer in the family, the shadow of the eldest daughter covered the light, and she was also the only character who did not show her face, which also reflected the dark shadow of the eldest daughter from the side.
In fact, in the end, the existence of "witches" is more like a psychological sin of people.
As mentioned earlier, the director himself is a fan of Kubrick. The whole film is full of the flavor of "The Shining", and the eldest daughter is like the "husband" in "The Shining". What happened in the end? Woolen cloth?
If not, watch the movie again.
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