Instead of being the character that we're superficially told to hate but secretly acknowledge as the personification of liberation? The "Satan is actually a good guy/makes sense/is an anti-villain/hero" trope is so cliche and we honestly need more movies where Satan is an absolute villain that we want to delightfully see the death of.
Bunch of Christian right wing nuts in here.
Lots of movie about the devil. What you suggest is the cliché.
It'd pretty hard to buy that this guy can lure people to eternal damnation if he's doesn't come off as a likeable guy no?
shareDid you watch the same movie? Satan IS the villain here. He tempted a young girl, who was genuinely trying to be a good, devout, pious person, murdered her father in front of her, and got her to sell her soul to him, damning her for eternity. That seems pretty thoroughly villainous to me. And the "liberation" you speak of is the freedom to do what one wants -- at the price of committing unspeakable atrocities against the innocent.
And BTW, in case you missed it, the flying/levitating she and the other witches in that coven do at the end -- yeah, that's probably the remains of her two younger siblings cooking in that fire. Remember, they were missing at the end, after confronting that old hag who was drinking from the goat in their pen. Aand we saw the little baby ground into a paste and turned into a flying ointment by one witch earlier in the picture. And Eggers explicitly based this on a belief originating in medieval Europe that the ointment witches made for this purpose came from the boiled fat of a child. So as Thomasin rises in ecstasy at the end of the film, the uplift she feels comes from the smoking remains of her younger sister and brother, and is a herald of the terrible things she will now do to other children from this point on.
Honestly, this was one of the most thoroughly villainous portrayals of Satan I've seen on film in a very long time. He is evil incarnate here, and, fully consistent with his traditional history, he is primarily a tempter of others to do evil on his behalf.
Just so that you know Darren, they were’t missing. After Thomasin wakes up & her father also wakes up & looks into the barn we see Thomasin cradle what looks to be one of the twins, most likely Mercy in her arms in the barn so they were still there then.
shareHaha, but seriously tho, why can't there be a single movie where the murderous Jewish demon JHWH is portrayed in a negative light? :^)
share[deleted]
That's because Hollywood secretly worships him. It's how people rise to power in that world.
shareWhat the fuck. You liked Satan in this movie? What kind of weird thread is this?
Not to mention that Hollywood is full of representations of a diabolically villainous Satan.
A popular interpretation of the film is that it is the girl throwing off the shackles of her sexist, regressive, religious household and exchanging it for freedom. That interpretation is either missing the horrible price paid and the darkness in the film. The parents weren't nice, and they did do things that were abusive (at least by our standards), but did they deserve to die? Even if the answer is yes, that still overlooks the infanticide at the beginning of the film.
I think that the movie is more complex than simply saying, "The Devil represents knowledge and freedom, and religion is bad". I think it's got more depth than that in showing the hideousness of what was going on in that household, and is a warning of imbalance, if anything. Consider that too much strictness ostracizes the family and then drives the girl to hate them so much that she accepts this hideous evil, but the evil is undeniably hideous.
Huh. I wasn't aware of that interpretation, or any really. So that's where OP was coming from. I still think the question was ridiculous, but yeah, I didn't quite realize that there was also this reading either.
I've only seen this film once before and I didn't really dig around to discuss it or dive more deeply into it. When I'd recommended the film in the past, I pretty much did so with the understanding that the film was about a family slowly being corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the devil. The family structure was imperfect of course—the parents were not nice as you said—but I felt that those dysfunctional relationships were part of what invited in the devil, and they were ultimately exacerbated by his influence. (I've often compared this to Jack Torrance's corruption in the Shining.)
I think it's got more depth than that in showing the hideousness of what was going on in that household, and is a warning of imbalance, if anything. Consider that too much strictness ostracizes the family and then drives the girl to hate them so much that she accepts this hideous evil, but the evil is undeniably hideous.
I think a LOT of it is people seeing what they want to see. It is quite in-vogue right now to lampoon or hate on religion, particularly Christianity, and so people see that, even when it's not there, or not the complete message. Two groups of people want to see this, too. The first are the people who hate that 1950s mentality and want to hate on its values, so they'll see anything as an indictment of Christianity and ignore conflicting messages. The other group are staunch religious people who, oftentimes, kinda enjoy being persecuted. They have a martyr complex, or something. So they tend to see persecution everywhere so they can wail out and cry.
This is all from my personal observations, so I don't have a survey or anything, and please do take this with a grain or two of salt.
I've only seen it once, too, but I've also seen The Lighthouse, and I just think that Robert Eggers is way too good a filmmaker to deliver a "reject religion" soapbox movie. I think he's talking about extremism, pervasiveness of evil, and he's setting up order vs. chaos and showing both the benefits and dangers of each. There's probably a lot more. Simultaneously to this, he seems to just be delivering a wicked-good (pun intended) horror film.
lmao, amusing breakdown. It is in commonplace now to criticize Christianity, so you end up having parties on both sides that are quick to presume that that's what's happening: one side to substantiate their frustration, and the other side to...also substantiate their frustration lol
Agreed about Eggers; The Lighthouse confirms that. He's far too talented to go for something so trite. I think to add to your list, I think there's also something to be said about the family having been banished from their town too. I did wonder what the significance of that was.
I think that sets up how they aren't really good examples of the community. In other words, what's being rebelled against isn't good Christianity. I wonder if the family aren't being shown to be too strict for Puritans (quite an indictment).
On the other hand... it's also possible that there was already some strange Satanism happening, through the goat, or through the weird children, or something. Maybe it's implying they've been marked out for destruction for awhile.
Or, maybe again it's more about showing how ostracizing the family creates the tension-filled environment that breeds the further tensions that ultimately unravel them all. Like this vicious cycle of constricting religion that ultimately explodes (implodes?) into demonic activity?