Anya Taylor-Joy Folk Thriller The Witch Is Leaving Netflix

Anya Taylor-Joy established herself as one of her generation’s leading and most versatile actors. At 30, she built a career across film and television, appearing in franchises like Super Mario and Mad Max, and winning a Golden Globe for her role in The Queen’s Gambit. She starred in the Apple TV series Lucky and appeared in Dune: Part Three. She fits the movie-star label. Her career began with a breakout role that turned the final girl trope on its head, featuring a girl who survives not by fighting, but by giving in.

The Witch premiered in 2015, serving as a calling card for Taylor-Joy as a rising star and Robert Eggers as a director to watch. It turned Black Phillip the goat into a contemporary horror icon almost overnight. More than a decade later, the film remains invigorating. It streams on Netflix until Oct. 1, leaving a matter of days left to watch it.

What is The Witch about?

The Witch follows a devout, isolated Puritan family in 1630s New England, a time when witches, myth, and folklore stood at the root of everyday fears. Following their exile from the religious community due to a dispute with the church, a family of seven relocated to the outskirts of society, with the dark, unmapped woods mere feet away.

The film is steeped in its historical setting, and its characters speak a dense form of archaic English, with religion at the center of their lives. That can prove a tough watch for modern viewers, but The Witch tells a simple story about a family hitting its breaking point.

With no animals left to hunt and their crops rotting, William (Ralph Ineson) and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) grew desperate. They spent their days bitterly arguing in their cramped home and blaming each other for everything that went wrong. Their younger kids absorbed the tension and acted out in ways that made lives more difficult. Things boiled over when the family’s newborn, Samuel, disappeared under the watch of their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy).

What followed was a haunting and violent tragedy.

Spoilers follow for The Witch.

Living deliciously

Thomasin quickly became the family’s scapegoat. Blamed for the loss of Samuel, she became the target of everyone’s projections. Katherine, consumed by grief, saw her daughter’s developing body as the devil’s work. Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), her younger brother, was drawn to her out of loneliness and a newly awakened sexuality. The twins prompted accusations of witchcraft against her. Even her father, who claimed to be devout, failed her by setting her up to take the blame for the silver cup he sold without telling his wife.

When the imposing goat Black Phillip revealed his true demonic nature to Thomasin, she had nothing left to lose. The moment came almost as a relief.

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

This line remains chilling, due to the tone and pitch of voice actor Daniel Malik and because it offered Thomasin a way to let go. She signed his book, took off her clothes, and walked into the woods that haunted her family since the start of the film.

The ending invites multiple interpretations. Viewers can see it as a tragedy in which Thomasin succumbed to the evil that destroyed her family, or as a tale of liberation where she found a community of like-minded women cast out by a puritanical society. The typical final girl survives by defeating evil, whereas Thomasin embraced it.

While the film served as a major debut for Taylor-Joy, it introduced the world to Robert Eggers, a director with a distinctive cinematic voice. Known for atmospheric, meticulously crafted productions and obsessive attention to period detail, Eggers expanded his vision of cinema through the myths of the Vikings in The Northman, which reunited him with Taylor-Joy, and Nosferatu, an adaptation and key entry in the vampire canon.

Eggers returned to theaters on Dec. 25 with Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a cursed man in 13th-century England. Revisiting where it all began offers insight into his work: a girl, a goat, and a choice.

The Witch streams on Netflix until Oct. 1.

Source: Polygon