Eggers’s sharpest decision, what makes you and the movie jump, is that he stays inside the characters’ worlds and heads, all disastrously close quarters. Eggers does with dependably spooky stuff like abrupt edits that fall as heavily as William’s ax and shifts in sound levels that fill silences with a choral caterwauling. Good horror movies make fright palpable, which Mr. There are gods and fathers in “The Witch” as well, even if this movie finally settles into a specifically American story about a catastrophe of faith. Eggers was also familiar with “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s 2009 film about God and patriarchy, authority and domination in Germany before World War I.

Eggers has looked elsewhere for inspiration, including period accounts like those of Cotton Mather, the Boston minister who influenced the lethal 1692 Salem Witch Trials that Arthur Miller turned into McCarthy-era theater. The story of the New England Puritans is itself a folk tale that’s been told, retold and fought over through generations of Thanksgiving school pageants, endless productions of “The Crucible” and historical revisionism. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie. Within minutes William’s family is on its lonely road, an exodus that - underlined by the image of the colony gates closing - instills a tremor of anxiety. From the start, with antiqued detail, naturalistic lighting and tightly packed bodies, he signals the claustrophobia of the plantation, where religious fanaticism meets groupthink. He has a background working on sets and costumes across the arts (his credits include “Sesame Street” and the theater group La MaMa), and the world he and his team conjure in “The Witch” is meticulous and immersive. Eggers knows how to dress a room beautifully and establish a mood quickly. As the wind stirs the trees and the children taunt one another with talk of witches, you may remember that the movie’s subtitle is “A New-England Folktale.” Something wicked this way comes? There, the family members build a farm, grow corn and commit themselves to God, a contract tested by a series of calamities that turn this story of belief into a freak-out of doubt. It’s set a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth and tracks William’s family as it leaves the plantation to settle down alone at the edge of a forest. Written and directed by Robert Eggers, “The Witch ” takes place in an America that in its extremes feels more familiar than its period drag might suggest.

The witch elm review new york times