Abstract
The demise of a child, a tragedy that occurs every few seconds on the face on this planet, marred by starvation and abject poverty, always constitutes a grim mystery, challenging every religious outlook and philosophy. Robert Eggers’ 2015 movie, The Witch, depicts the tragic loss of a baby, in this case posing the additional mystery as to exactly how it occurred. Though the specters of malnutrition and malady haunt this film, the precise circumstances surrounding the child’s fate are left largely to the viewer’s imagination.
The film explores the question as to where we can lay blame for ostensibly senseless tragedy. Within its narrative world, and arguably, within the worldview of the religious imagination more broadly, humanity seeks someone or something to blame for horrific events. Recent tragedies and world history attest to the human tendency, in the face of immense suffering, to scapegoat some alleged culprit, perhaps going so far as to allege their complicity with the devil, to directly identify them as Satan—or to more subtly demonize them. No single religion or worldview can boast sole claim to this propensity that to this present day claims lives.
The Witch raises the question as to whether culpability for evil resides ultimately with the self, with social structures, with humanity as a whole, with inhuman forces of nature, or within the supernatural realm. The mystery is at its most agonizing when conventional moralizing is befuddled and there is no obvious culprit, no free-willed villain caught with a smoking gun. Eggers’ screenplay sustains the ambiguity that can enshroud tragedy such as the unresolved abduction of a child or sudden infant death, blurring the line between facticity and the archetypal imagery through which the psyche seeks to express that which it cannot explain.
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