The Craft — Nancy's turn

Observation

Nancy invokes Manon alone, on the beach, in a storm. She goes home to the trailer, where her mother's boyfriend is on the couch. He dies of a heart attack. The insurance pays out, and the next time we see her she is in a clean apartment with a view.

From here the performance escalates and the film's sympathy withdraws. Balk plays the rest of the picture at a pitch nobody else is attempting — the flattened vowels, the stare, the sudden stillness inside the mania — and the script's job becomes containing her.

The turn is a class story before it is a horror story

Every reading of the film that treats Nancy as simply corrupted skips what the Mise en scène establishes in her first scene at home. She is the only one of the four who is poor. Sarah has a house and a father who worries. Bonnie's problem is her scars, Rochelle's is the racism she is subjected to at school — both live in comfortable homes. Nancy lives in a trailer with her mother and a man who is a threat.

So what Nancy asks for is not the same order of request as the others. Bonnie wants her skin, Rochelle wants to be left alone, Sarah wants a boy to like her. Nancy wants out (Nancy is the only poor one). The film grants it, and then treats her wanting it as the original sin.

Connotation code by code

Acting

The film's reputation rests here. Balk is doing something none of the other three are: she plays Nancy as someone whose ordinary register is already too loud for the room, so the escalation has nowhere to go except into stillness. The most frightening choices in the performance are the quiet ones.

Ebert, unimpressed by almost everything else, noticed:

All four are convincing performers, Balk relishes her character's loathsome behavior, and Rachel True has the sunniest smile since Doris Day.

— Ebert — The Craft review (1996)

Note the verb. Relishes. Even a two-star review recorded that the performance was operating above the material. See Acting.

Character

Nancy is the film's engine and its designated problem, which is a structural contradiction rather than a character arc. The screenplay needs her to be the reason the coven works and the reason it must be dismantled, so the second half converts a person into a threat without giving her a decision that would justify the conversion. The mechanism is external — Manon, the power, the invocation — so nothing she chooses explains what she becomes.

Compare Killing the protagonist at minute 47: Psycho reassigns audience allegiance deliberately and prepares it scene by scene. The Craft reassigns it by fiat, and the performance keeps pulling the other way (The Craft turns on its own coven).

Colour and mise en scène

The palette moves with her: the trailer's sodium and brown, the storm on the beach, then the cold blue-white of the new apartment, and finally the institutional flatness of where she ends up. Colour here is doing straightforward class signalling, and it is the most legible thing in the film's design.

Where the fourth girl goes

Rochelle's arc runs alongside and gets even less resolution. Rachel True has said the racism storyline was written only after she was cast — the character had originally been bulimic (Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)) — and that she played the retaliation spell differently from the other three on purpose (Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose). Both facts matter to how the ending treats her.

Audience

The reappraisal has largely been a reappraisal of Nancy: the character read in 1996 as the cautionary example is now routinely read as the film's centre and its most sympathetic figure (The Craft got better as it got older). The film did not change. What changed is which half of it audiences take seriously.

Production context

The invocation Nancy performs was designed by the film's witchcraft consultant, who invented the deity precisely so it could not be copied (Manon was invented so nobody could call him). She also argued the coven needed a real initiation earlier in the film, on the grounds that you cannot threaten someone with death for leaving a group they never joined (Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft) — a dramaturgical objection from a religious adviser, and a sharper one than most of the reviews managed.

Compare

• The Craft — light as a feather — the coven before the film decided it was a problem.
• Taxi Driver — the mirror — another performance that outgrew its script and became the thing the film is remembered for.
• Alice — the prologue — the other note here about a film arguing with its own genre about what a woman is allowed to want.

Writing leads

• Check the runtime split. My claim is that sympathy withdraws at the invocation; find the actual minute and see whether the film marks it or slides.
• Rewatch for whether Nancy is ever given a line that states her class position outright, or whether it is entirely production design. If the latter, that is a strong Mise en scène example worth its own note.
• The ending — the institution, the last shot. Read it against the original closing scene the consultant says was cut, in which Sarah reads to children in a forest clearing. Two very different films.