Tag: Anya Taylor-Joy

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

When Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) sizes up Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the first time, she’s standing alone in the middle of the wasteland, bloodied and bruised. They are the only two survivors of a brutal desert battle which has left the road behind them littered with twisted steel and broken bodies. Furiosa has “a purposeful savagery” which makes her an ideal candidate for promotion to Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Jack offers to take her under his wing  — she’s just killed most of his crew, so he needs the help driving the War Rig. 

By the time she gets her field promotion, Furiosa has already lived four lives. She was a carefree youth, privileged to live in The Green Place, a matriarchal society that retained a high level of technology in a sheltered secret valley. At age ten (Alaya Browne plays Youngest Furiosa), she is taken captive by raiders from the Biker Horde of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and forced to live in a cage as his “daughter.” When Dementus makes a play for Wasteland dominance by taking on Immortan Joe, Furiosa is traded, along with a doctor (Angus Sampson) as part of an armistice deal. She is sent to the vault where Immortan keeps his harem, where she first shaves her head as part of an elaborate escape plan. With sons like Rictus Errectus (Nathan Jones) and his slightly brighter brother, Scrotus (Josh Helman), it’s easy to see why Immortan Joe would need Furiosa, who is always the smartest person in the room, to breed future “Warlord Jr’s.” Furiosa escapes the rape chamber to live for a while disguised as a War Boy while she bides her time, and plots her ultimate escape back to the Green Place. 

Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his minons. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

We first met Furiosa in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where she staged a high-octane escape from the Immortal Man’s Citadel, and took his five perfect wives with her. It was the fourth installment in director George Miller’s Mad Max series, which began as gonzo Australian Oz-sploitation in 1979 and broke into the American popular imagination in 1981 with The Road Warrior. Max, a former Aussie highway patrolman turned wasteland legend, was played in the first three films by Mel Gibson, then by Tom Hardy in Fury Road. Even though his name was in the title, Hardy’s Max was utterly upstaged in Fury Road by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Her indelible performance elevated the film from one of the best action films ever made to one of the best films ever made, period. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga began life as an anime series intended to accompany Fury Road if it had been made as planned in the mid-’00s. Furiosa retains the episodic structure, with cards announcing chapter titles. It is framed as the remembrance of The History Man (George Shevtsov), who shared Dementus’ cage with Furiosa. Miller has said the Mad Max films are folk legends of the future told by those who are trying to rebuild human society after the combination of ecological collapse and nuclear war have laid waste to the planet. Fury Road is told in close-up, zoomed in on three hard days in the wasteland. Furiosa begins with a zoom in from space onto the Australian outback, signaling that Miller is working in a different register. The intricate chase scenes, which Miller does better than anyone ever has, still pop. “Chapter 3: Stowaway”, which reportedly took five years to plan and six months to film, rises to Fury Road’s heights. 

Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

But Miller is more concerned with the people in the wasteland. Fury Road bore the mark of silent stunt genius Buster Keaton. Furiosa’s Bildungsroman, the story of how the child became the woman, and the woman became the hero, is in the mode of an Akira Kurosawa samurai epic. That’s why the 15-year story’s climax, the 40 Day Wasteland War, takes place largely off screen. Furiosa both starts the war and finishes it. The piles of burning corpses tell you everything to you need to know about what happened in between. 

To hear Dementus tell it, Furiosa’s problem is that she has hope. She saw the Green Place. She knows life doesn’t have to be a brutal scramble for survival, where your first instinct is to loot your buddy’s corpse. Hemsworth is deliciously unhinged on the surface, but he is, like Hamlet, “mad in craft.” At least at first. As the years go by, the level of brutality needed to control a hoard of cannibalistic bikers starts to take its toll. This is by far the best performance of Hemsworth’s career. 

He almost, but not quite, upstages the Furiosas. Anya Taylor-Joy has the unenviable assignment of following a titan like Charlize Theron. Fortunately, she has help from Alyla Browne, a 14-year-old newcomer who is completely at home chewing through a motorcycle fuel line. As the traumas pile up, and the flamethrowers roar, she slowly comes into focus. Will she be a monster, like Dementus, or a protector, like her mother? Then, in one epic moment on the top of a speeding war rig, Taylor-Joy looks into the camera, and there she is, our Furiosa, ready to fight the whole rotten world. 

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Now Playing: Pinnochio, Iñárritu, and a Dangerous Dish

Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"

If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.

Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.

Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!

As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.

Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.

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The Northman

Alexander Skarsgaard as Amleth in The Northman.

Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most dissected play, and arguably the greatest work of literature in the English language — despite the fact that it is set not in England, but in Denmark. The texts the Bard was drawing on were already 400 years old when he was writing at the turn of the 17th century, but the story of Amleth, the Viking prince who seeks revenge after his uncle murders his father and marries his mother, is believed to be much older. The original saga is lost to history, but it probably came from Iceland around 900 CE. 

The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers and written by the Icelandic poet and musician Sjón, is on some level an attempt to reconstruct that lost story. At times, you can be forgiven if you think it seems like an attempt to adapt Hamlet as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. But one thing is for sure: This is the most Viking work of art in the last thousand years or so. 

How Viking are we talking? Burley men raise drinking horns to their liege in fire-lit mead halls. Longboats ferry warriors to raid and pillage. Priests of Odin whip berserkers into a murderous frenzy with guttural death metal chants. It’s constantly snowing, but people are half naked anyway. There are literal dogs of war, and they are literally let slip. A dead hero is set adrift on a burning boat. There’s sex in a volcanic hot spring. Nicole Kidman threatens to eat someone’s heart. Björk instructs the hero on how to acquire a magic sword by fighting an undead barrow-wight. We see Yggdrasil the World Tree framed by the Northern Lights. And, of course, valkyries appear to ride the spirits of dead warriors to Valhalla. 

This is not the sanitized, horned-helmet-wearing, Marvel comics Thor vision of Viking-hood. This is blood and mud and ice and pagan gods, and, reader, I am here for it. 

Björk taking the Viking thing to the next level.

We meet young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) when his father Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from plundering the English Coast. The fight was hard, and the king sports a nasty sword wound that has him thinking about his mortality. Against the objections of his mother Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Aurvandil decides to initiate Amleth into manhood, so he can be prepared to take his place on the throne if and when the king dies in battle. The ceremony, in which the father and son ingest a psychedelic tea brewed by the shaman/fool Heimir (a gloriously crazed Willem Dafoe), is the first taste of just how bonkers this movie is going to get. 

Turns out, Aurvandil was prescient. As they’re leaving the ceremony, the king is bushwhacked by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and young Amleth escapes by sea. As he rows away, he chants his new checklist: 1. Avenge father, 2. rescue mother, 3. kill uncle. 

Years later, Amleth has grown into the extremely healthy form of Alexander Skarsgard, whose ab muscles ripple from pulling longboat oars. He’s pillaging with a band of berserkers operating in the land of the Kievan Rus, which is now known as Ukraine. There, he meets a seeress (Björk) who tells him Fjölnir almost immediately lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, where he has set up a new settlement with Gudrún at his side. Ameth stows away on a ship bound for Iceland disguised as a slave, and meets the gloriously named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic sorceress who pledges to help him seek revenge in return for her freedom. 

Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy plot revenge.

Eggers creates worlds that follow the mythology of their inhabitants while also offering sly comment on said mythology. Like the Puritan patriarch in The Witch, the evil Fjölnir is exposed as an incompetent braggart. When his men discover a group of warriors slain by the rampaging Amleth, they are convinced their “savage” Christian enemies must be behind it, because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree” — never mind that we’ve just spent the last 90 minutes watching these “civilized” Norsemen rape and pillage everything in sight.  Ultimately, everyone is doomed not by their predetermined fates, but by their belief that fate is predetermined.

Eggers is a director with a vision who has been given the kind of budget that lets him explore the outer limits of his talent, and he does not throw away his shot. The Northman is a living, breathing, spitting, farting, blood-spurting trip to cinematic Valhalla. 

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Last Night in Soho

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Sandie in Edgar Wright’s new thriller, a Focus Features release. (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / © 2021 Focus Features, LLC)

There’s no such thing as “the good ole days.” The past was just as full of horrors as the present. You just forgot how bad it was, or nobody wrote the bad parts down — or maybe you just didn’t read the people who wrote the bad parts down. 

That’s the ultimate theme of Edgar Wright’s new thriller, Last Night in Soho. It’s definitely a case of an artist trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Wright both luxuriates in nostalgia, and undercuts it at the same time. For an unapologetic popster like Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Baby Driver, examining the dark side of his obsessions has led to the deepest work of his career. And he got there without sacrificing any of the visceral thrills he’s so good at delivering. 

Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / Focus Features)

The film’s object of nostalgia is swinging London of the 1960s. That’s the scene that gestated The Beatles and The Who, but Wright’s attention is on the slick pop of Dusty Springfield and Sandy Shaw. That’s the music Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is listening to in the film’s opening sequence as she dances in a dress made of newspaper. Wright immediately reveals the essentials of her character by whipping his camera around her room. She wants to be a fashion designer, she lives in a small town, where her ’60s obsession marks her as a girl out of time, and her mother is a ghost. 

About that last bit. Ellie has visions, often of dead people, and Ellie’s grandma (Rita Tushingham) reveals that her mother did, too, and these visions eventually became so disturbing and uncontrollable that Ellie’s mom killed herself. When Ellie is accepted into the London College of Fashion, grandma is supportive, but warns that if life in the big city becomes too overwhelming, don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Dame Diana Rigg as Miss Collins

Her idealized version of London is dispelled immediately, as her cab driver taking her from the train station to her dorm creeps on her. Things get worse when meets her roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), a coke-snorting mean girl who calls herself “Hurricane Jocasta.”  These living arrangements aren’t tenable for the studious, and somewhat mentally fragile Ellie, so she finds a cheap room in a boarding house run by Miss Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role). In order to pay for it, and clothes from the fashionable West End shops that surround the college, she gets a job in a dive bar called The Toucan, where she serves drinks to an old barfly (Terence Stamp) who takes an interest in her. 

Matt Smith, a former Doctor Who, as Jack

Ellie does get more sleep in the new room, but that sleep comes with vivid dreams of the West End in the mid-’60s featuring a girl named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer who falls for Jack (Matt Smith), a manager with an eye for new talent. The beautiful, confident Sandy represents an ideal self for the mousy small-town girl, and when Ellie dyes her hair blonde like Sandy’s, boys start to notice her. But Ellie’s dreams take a dark turn as Sandy falls deeper into the seedy side of London. The 1960s produced great music and fashion, but it was a man’s world. Young women like Sandy put up with brutal misogyny, even from men who professed to love them. The mystery of Sandy’s fate starts to weigh on Ellie, as her visions invade her waking life.  

Wright is inspired by stylish English films of the period by directors like Nicholas Roeg, but the screenplay, co-written with Penny Dreadful scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns, critiques the material it celebrates. It’s the director’s first film with a female protagonist (although he has created many memorable women, such as Ramona Flowers), and the change in perspective seems to have invigorated his imagination. The cast is aces, including veterans like Rigg and Stamps and the brilliantly paired co-leads of Taylor-Joy and McKenzie. 

Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie make out with Doctor Who.

Wright’s one of contemporary cinema’s most inventive visual stylists, and this film is a feast of in-camera effects and plain old misdirection. While in the visions of the past, Ellie and Sandy can only see each other in mirrors, even as their identities are merging, Persona-style. This presents endless opportunities for Wright to pull some boffo visual gags. But even as the director is emptying his trick bag all over the screen, the story keeps humming along at a brisk pace. This helps later in the film, when it gets harder to keep all the plot plates spinning. Last Night in Soho is a pop confection that’s not just empty calories. Don’t miss this opportunity to see a master like Wright at the top of his game. 

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The Queen’s Gambit: Sex, Drugs, and … Chess?

Some artists’ talent emerges fully formed, while others’ takes time and practice to come to fruition. The Queen’s Gambit is a story about the former, created by the latter.

The project that would become the Netflix limited series is also a late-bloomer. Walter Tevis, whose novels have been adapted into films such as The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, published The Queen’s Gambit in 1983. The film rights were quickly snapped up, but the writer’s death the next year put production in limbo. Many have tried to adapt it over the years — at one point, it was to be Heath Ledger’s directorial debut — but it was the Netflix money machine that finally greenlit it with veteran writer Scott Frank at the helm. Frank is the quintessential journeyman screenwriter who broke through with 1991’s Dead Again for Kenneth Branagh and who wrote classics like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Minority Report. The Queen’s Gambit marks the 60-year-old’s debut as a showrunner, and the results are absolutely immaculate.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays an orphaned chess prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) is, like most great protagonists, an orphan. Her mother, Alice (Chloe Pirrie), dies in a car crash during the first episode “Openings,” but Beth (played as a child by Isla Johnston) emerges unscathed. She is delivered to an orphanage run by Helen Deardorff (Christiane Seidel), where her life only comes further unglued.

It’s the mid-1950s, so Helen’s child-rearing philosophies are, shall we say, much less enlightened than she thinks they are. In the spirit of “better living through chemistry,” the orphans are all given tranquilizers to help head off any behavioral problems. The drugs don’t seem to work for Jolene (Moses Ingram), one of the few Black girls at the orphanage. Jolene befriends Beth by advising her to save the green pills for a bedtime binge, and then seals their friendship by teaching her how to cuss and explaining what a penis is.

It’s the stuff millions of middle-school friendships are made of, but perhaps Beth and Jolene’s “friendship” should be in quotation marks. Young Beth is one of the most withdrawn and solitary characters ever put to screen. Even before she was orphaned, it’s doubtful she ever spent a happy day in the care of her clearly mentally ill mother. At age 8, she is tight-lipped and fiercely controlled. The only joys in her young life at the orphanage are benzo-induced out-of-body experiences and sneaking into the basement to play chess with the janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp).

Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Taylor-Joy

Shaibel is a fellow loner, and an amateur scholar of the game. He is startled as Beth’s talents become instantly apparent. In a matter of weeks, she goes from not knowing the rules to regularly beating him. But her strategic mind remains a secret until the state bans the orphanage from feeding the kids tranquilizers.

Desperate for some more of those little green pills, Beth hatches a plan to secure a supply. The sequence where she attempts her drug heist is flawless, and it sets up her character for the rest of the series. She plans each move in advance and executes with cold-blooded precision — until she gets her hands on the giant jar of feel-good candy. Even with her endgame in sight, she’s still shoveling pills into her mouth when she’s caught by essentially the entire orphanage. She’s banned from playing chess until she’s adopted by Alma Wheatly (Marielle Heller), a neglected housewife whose crushed dream was to be a piano player.

For the rest of the seven episodes, Beth struggles to find a balance between her prodigious genius and the emotional pain that stalks her every move. After an incredible start by Isla Johnston, who plays Beth as a child, Taylor-Joy plays her as an alien observing the puny humans around her. Like Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, she is not so much emotionless as she is sacrificing all feeling to keep a deep, horrible rage in check.

Scott’s direction is clearly Kubrickian, and Taylor-Joy knows how to deliver a dead-eyed stare. She’s gorgeous and elegant as she conquers the world of competitive chess, but you never doubt for a second that there is a huge, throbbing brain behind those eyes — dissecting your every move. The production design is off-the-charts good as Beth travels to Cold War-era Las Vegas, Paris, and Moscow to play for bigger and bigger purses, and fight for respect from the sexist chess bros who can’t fathom getting beaten by a girl.

In an age of padded narratives designed to maximize streaming engagement, The Queen’s Gambit remains taut up until the last two episodes, when Beth’s addictions hit bottom as she preps for a championship match against Russian champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski).

The Queen’s Gambit probably could have wrapped in six episodes, but when a show’s world is rendered so beautifully, you won’t mind a little extra time to look around.

The Queen’s Gambit is streaming on Netflix.

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Split

The year is 2017, and there is much strangeness in the air: Donald Trump is in the Oval Office, it’s 78 degrees in February, and M. Night Shyamalan made a great movie.

I have never understood the cult of Shyamalan. (It’s been 17 years, so I’m going to just come out and say it: “Bruce Willis is also a ghost!” is a dumb excuse for a plot twist.) Personally, I’ve enjoyed exactly one of his 13 previous films, the stealth superhero story Unbreakable. Unfortunately, that was also the point when the late-story plot twist became cemented as Shyamalan’s gimmick, and his stories, stylishly told as they are, became progressively more pointless. I would peg the nadir of his career around 2008, when he made a movie about nothing happening called The Happening, but fans of the anime series Avatar: the Last Airbender would claim his 2010 evisceration of the franchise as the low point, while financiers who backed Will Smith’s vanity project After Earth would say the director hit rock bottom in 2013.

Maybe the problem all along was that Shyamalan was getting too much money. After Earth cost $130 million. (That it officially returned $244 million and is still considered a huge failure is an insight into everything that’s wrong with 21st century Hollywood.) Split, the current No. 1 movie at the box office, cost $9 million. Maybe Shyamalan just works better under constraints.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey, the least popular girl in school

It also seems to help that Split is not a puzzle movie, that nebulous subgenre inspired by The Sixth Sense and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which rewards the viewer for piecing together the plot from a slow dribble of ambiguous information. Shyamalan has cut loose his signature gimmick in favor of jumping on all of the trends in contemporary horror at once, and throwing in a pinch of Hitch for good measure. When the film opens, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are waiting on Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) to get picked up by her family from the restaurant where Claire just had her 16th birthday party. Casey, the least popular girl at school, was invited out of pity, and now Claire has to give her a ride home. But once they’ve piled into the minivan, a stranger gets in the car and renders the girls unconscious with an anesthetic spray. When they wake up, they’re in an underground holding cell. Their kidnapper is revealed to be Dennis (James McAvoy), whose fastened top button and fastidious neat freakery signify dangerous mental instability.

The opening sequence is classic Shyamalan. He uses the banal conformity of suburban America to set a mood of inhuman creepiness and then tosses in slight violations of normality to create tension. Shyamalan movies can sometimes feel like a Skinner box experiment, with a clinical psychologist probing for just the right stimulus to create a fear response. If Split feels more organic, it’s almost entirely because of the pair of killer lead performances from McAvoy and Taylor-Joy. Dennis’ real name is Kevin, a guy suffering from severe dissociative identity disorder, what used to be commonly called schizophrenia or, slightly more accurately, “split personalities.” Kevin’s psyche is divided into 23 personalities, all of whom happen to be over-actors, giving McAvoy an excuse to suck all the juice off the ham bone. It ain’t subtle, but it’s a dazzling display of technique by McAvoy. At one point, when Kevin is talking to his long-suffering shrink Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), McAvoy plays one personality pretending to be another personality while Shyamalan keeps him in tight close-up to catch the fine shading. Taylor-Joy’s performance as the damaged, clever final girl, Casey, is much more conventional. She provides the much-needed straight woman to McAvoy’s antics, showing her character’s innate empathy with her big, expressive eyes.

Split‘s excellent widescreen camera work seems inspired by the ruthless beauty of It Follows, and the claustrophobic plot takes cues from Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Shyamalan’s greatest strength has always been building individual scenes; sprung from the puzzle movie trap, he is free to riff away. Even a half-hearted “big twist” head fake at the end can’t drag down Split‘s momentum.

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The Witch

Every year around Halloween, I get a hankering for Hammer horror. Atmospheric films like The Gorgon or Christopher Lee’s Dracula, made before slasher pictures gave the genre a bloody sameness, have a certain pleasing gothic creepiness that transcends their screenplay and acting faults. The Witch, which won Robert Eggers a directing award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, seems like it was created out of the Platonic ideal of a Hammer-period horror film, with all of the creep and none of the camp.

It begins with a family of five being expelled from an unnamed New England plantation that looks a lot like Salem circa 1690. The cause of the schism is some obscure doctrinal dispute between the family patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) and the town council of puritans led by the Governor (Julian Richings). Significantly, it is William who denounces the townspeople as being insufficiently pure, claiming his family are the only ones who practice true Christianity.

Ellie Grainger, Black Phillip the Satanic goat, and Lucas Dawson struggle to survive.

William takes his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), tween son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), elementary-aged twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and infant Samuel into the forest to build a new life for themselves where they can worship free from the corrupting influences of the world. But the woods they chose for their new home already has an inhabitant: a shapeshifting witch played in various forms by Bathsheba Garnett and Sarah Stephens.

A card at the end of the film notes that it was based on historical accounts of witchcraft trials from the late seventeenth century, when there weren’t any witches with magical powers, just women whom the patriarchy had deemed too unimportant to feed and who used the magical thinking of theology to justify getting rid of. But there’s no doubt black magic is real in the world of The Witch: No sooner has the family built their farm than the witch snatches baby Samuel in the midst of a peekaboo game with Thomasin, grinds him up, bathes in his innocent blood, and goes for a flight on her broomstick.

The family is grief-stricken, with the burden falling heaviest on the mother, Katherine, who struggles to stay upright as conditions on the farm worsen. The crops are failing, and the animals are either getting sick, or, in the case of the huge goat named Black Phillip, developing a Satanic mean streak. Suspicion falls on Thomasin, the beautiful young daughter who is coming of age and inadvertently tempting her little brother with lustful thoughts. Taylor-Joy is riveting as the noose tightens around her, causing herself to question her own innocence. The high point of her performance comes when, pressured by her father to give a false confession, she snaps and suggests that maybe the reason why his farm is failing and his kids are dying is that he’s an arrogant religious nut who sucks at farming and is generally unprepared for the harsh life of the frontier.

Anya Taylor-Joy as accused witch Thomasin

From the safe and rationalist point of view of the 21st century, that sounds like a pretty accurate description of the conditions surrounding the Salem witch trials, but The Witch’s point of view is stuck firmly in the puritanical 17th century, where witches are real and want to do the devil’s bidding by messing with good Christians. The Witch of the Woods sinks her talons deep in William and systematically deprives him of everything he holds dear. It’s an epic slow burn that makes flawless use of the film’s 93-minute running time. Like the ornate Hammer films of the early 1960s, the production design puts us in the characters’ world from the beginning, but Eggers is going for a strict realism that makes the magical elements more creepy and unnerving. The low-light photography of Jarin Blaschke, such as the extended sequence around a tense dinner table lit only by dripping, homemade candles, takes a page from Kubrick’s groundbreaking work on Barry Lyndon and transforms the domestic scene into a Dutch Masters painting.

The controlled, almost serene pacing of The Witch goes against the grain of contemporary horror, but, taken with work like last year’s instant classic It Follows, it seems to point toward a new subgenre of arthouse horror. For fans of the creepy, it’s the year’s first must-see movie.