Andy Mitton co-directed two films with Jesse Holland, YellowBrickRoad (2010) and We Go On (2016) before striking out on his own with this quietly impressive solo debut. At heart it’s an old fashioned “house with a bad reputation” chiller but thanks to smart writing, excellent performances and a number of extremely spooky moments it stands out in an over-crowded field.
In New York City, twelve-year-old Finn (Charlie Tacker) has horrified his paranoid mother Beverly (Arija Bareikis) (“I’m just trying to keep him safe, and I am all alone in this. Up against the internet, random shootings, other people’s bad kids, the planet dying, and now this president”) when he’s caught watching terrorist execution videos on his computer. A desperate Beverly asks Finn’s estranged father, Simon (Alex Draper) to take him away for the summer. Simon has bought a rundown farmhouse in Vermont that he tells people he’s preparing to fix up and sell on though secretly he hopes it’ll be the new home that bring his fractured family back together. As father and son start to bond after years of paternal neglect, they come to suspect that they’re not alone in the house, a fear fuelled by local electrician Louis (Greg Naughton) who doesn’t like going into the house and who regales them with tales of its former owner, Lydia (Carol Stanzione) who the locals believed to have been a witch. She died, alone and unnoticed, sitting in her window for weeks before anyone realised that she was gone – though it turns out that she hasn’t gone very far and is soon stalking Simon and Finn.
The title is, perhaps, a little misleading, though cleverly so. Lydia is certainly a ghost but there’s no indication that she’s an actual witch at all. She’s referred to as such by the traumatised Louis but that’s just a local legend, an all-too-familiar response to strangeness and eccentricity in a small community. From Louis’ fearful account she was certainly an unpleasant person but whether she was actually using the supernatural to her own ends is up for debate – indeed the film seems to suggest that she may have been as much a victim of whatever forces lurk in the house as Simon and Finn.
As Simon and Finn bring the house back to life (Simon uses medical analogies throughout the film, calling him and Finn “house doctors”) so Lydia becomes stronger and more corporeal. The twist-laden final act suggests that it’s the house itself that’s driving the story rather than Lydia, desperate for another long-term resident, it’s motives verbalised in Lydia’s repeated screech of “stay!” whenever anyone tries to leave.
The film rests largely on the shoulders of Draper and Tacker (Bareikis doesn’t really make much impact until the final act) and they’re both extremely good, their strained but slowly improving relationship feeling often painfully real. The Witch in the Window is as much about father and son’s attempts to reconnect after years of neglect (at the start of the film they barely know each other at all) as it is about the haunting presence that brings them together. Unusually, Mitton (he also wrote the screenplay) doesn’t have Simon trying to put a brave face on things. He’s a s terrified and confused as his son, at a loss to offer words of comfort because he has none to offer.
There’s something inherently creepy about those once faddish Magic Eye pictures of the sort that hangs on Finn’s bedroom wall, that feeling of something hiding in plain sight waiting for you to see it amid the seemingly random assemblage of colours and shapes. Finn’s first sense that something is up with the house is when he likens it to the picture on his wall after he thinks he sees something that shouldn’t be there but can’t quite place what it is. It’s a clever analogy for Lydia’s initially peripheral presence that solidifies the more they actually look for her.
Mitton does well to generate a feeling of unease from the very start, using the impressive remote locations to heighten the paranoia and sense of isolation and delivering a few genuinely effective jump scares. He constantly sets us up for expected jolts that don’t come, keeping us on edge until he’s ready to spring the unexpected shock instead, finding room in a well-worn idea for plenty of little surprises. He also deftly pulls off a clever plot twist as the film moves into its closing stages – one of several but the first is the most impressive. It’s de rigeur for some viewers to claim “oh, I saw that coming!” but this one is so well played and so out of the blue (and yet it still rings horribly true) that anyone who tells you they knew what was happening is lying to you. It’s another quiet but skin-crawling moment delivered with no fuss, just a long-held medium shot as an awful truth slowly dawns on one of the characters.
The last few minutes pull the rug from under us completely, taking the film off in a more emotionally resonant direction. The ending is tragic but with a glimmer of hope and more than adequately pays off the investment in Simon and Finn’s relationship. It’s an unexpectedly quiet and moving climax to a film that cares as much about exploring the real horror of family break up as the supernatural horror of a haunted house.
The Witch in the Window is a brisk (top marks for bringing the story in at an economical 77 minutes) ghost story that takes some unusual and unexpected detours, with an excellent score from Mitton himself and excellent performances from all of the small cast (Carol Stanzione doesn’t get a lot to do as Lydia but is fantastically creepy in a way that recalls Pauline Moran’s eponymous spook in The Woman in Black (1989).
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