Anya Taylor-Joy has established herself as one of her era's most versatile actors. At 30, she's built a career across film and television, appearing in franchises like Super Mario and Mad Max, along with winning a Golden Globe for her role in The Queen’s Gambit. Earlier this year, she starred in the Apple TV series Lucky and will also play a major role in the cinematic event that is 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 career-defining breakout role, which turned the final girl trope on its head — 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 look out for. It also turned Black Phillip the goat into a contemporary horror icon almost overnight.
More than a decade later, the film remains just as invigorating. Right in time for Halloween, it's currently streaming for free on Plex with ads. (It's also on Prime Video, included with your Amazon Prime subscription.) The Witch follows a devout, isolated Puritan family in 1630s New England, a time when witches, myth, and folklore quietly stood at the root of most people’s everyday fears. Following their exile from the religious community due to a dispute with the church, a family of seven is forced to relocate 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 very 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. With no animals left to hunt and their crops rotting, 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), acting out in ways that make everyone's lives more difficult. Things boil over when the family’s newborn, Samuel, disappears under the watch of their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy).
What follows is a haunting and violent tragedy. Thomasin quickly becomes the family’s scapegoat. Blamed for the loss of Samuel, she becomes the target of everyone’s projections.
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