Anya Taylor-Joy’s Breakout Film The Witch Gave Horror a Different Kind of Female Lead

Anya Taylor-Joy has become one of the most versatile actors of her era. At 30, she has built a career across film and television. She has appeared in franchises like Super Mario and Mad Max and won a Golden Globe for The Queen’s Gambit. Earlier this year, she starred in the Apple TV series Lucky. She will also play a major role in Dune: Part Three. Taylor-Joy is one of the few modern stars who comfortably fit the movie-star label, and it all began with her breakout role. That role turned the final girl trope on its head. Her character survives not by fighting, but by giving in.

The Witch premiered in 2015. It served as a calling card for Taylor-Joy as a rising star and for Robert Eggers as a director to watch. It also turned Black Phillip the goat into a contemporary horror icon almost overnight. More than a decade later, the film still feels invigorating. Just in time for Halloween, it’s streaming for free on Plex with ads. It’s also on Prime Video, included with an Amazon Prime subscription.

What is The Witch about?

The Witch follows a devout, isolated Puritan family in 1630s New England. Witches, myth, and folklore quietly sat at the root of most people’s everyday fears in that era. After a dispute with the church gets them exiled from their religious community, the family of seven must relocate to the outskirts of society. The dark, unmapped woods sit just feet away.

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

No animals are left to hunt and the crops are rotting, so William (Ralph Ineson) and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) are desperate. They spend their days bitterly arguing in their cramped home and blaming each other for everything that goes wrong. Their younger kids absorb the tension, and perhaps Black Phillip’s devilish whispers. They act out in ways that make everyone’s lives harder. Things boil over when the family’s newborn, Samuel, disappears while their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), is watching him.

What follows is a haunting and violent tragedy.

Living deliciously

Thomasin quickly becomes the family’s scapegoat. Blamed for the loss of Samuel, she becomes the target of everyone’s projections. Katherine, consumed by grief, sees her daughter’s developing body as the devil’s work. Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), her younger brother, is drawn to her out of loneliness and a newly awakened sexuality. The twins’ overactive imaginations lead them to accuse her of witchcraft. Even her father fails her, despite claiming to be utterly devout. He sets her up to take the blame for the silver cup he sold without telling his wife.

Spoiler warning, but when the imposing goat Black Phillip reveals his true demonic nature to Thomasin, she has nothing left to lose. The moment comes almost as a relief.

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” is an iconic and chilling line. Part of the reason is the tone and pitch of voice actor Daniel Malik. The other part is that it’s Thomasin’s only offer to let go. She signs his book, takes off her clothes, and walks into the woods that have haunted her family since the start of the film.

The ending supports several readings. In one, it’s a tragedy in which Thomasin succumbs to the evil that destroyed her family. In another, it’s a story of liberation, in which she finds a community of like-minded women who were also cast out by a puritanical society that pitted them against each other. The typical final girl survives by defeating evil. Thomasin embraces it.

The film was a major debut for Taylor-Joy, and it also introduced the world to Eggers, a director with a distinctive cinematic voice. He is known for atmospheric, meticulously crafted productions and an obsessive attention to period detail. Every Eggers film expands his vision of cinema. The Northman, which reunited him with Taylor-Joy, explored the myths of the Vikings. His most recent film, Nosferatu, is a key entry in the vampire canon. It reminds viewers that these ancient creatures are far more than the sexy anti-heroes we’ve grown used to.

Eggers returns to theaters on Dec. 25 with Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a cursed man in 13th-century England. Whatever he does next with the myth, it’s worth revisiting where it all began, with a girl, a goat, and a choice.

The original article also noted that The Witch was streaming on Netflix until Oct. 1.

Source: Polygon