The Love Witch (

2016

)

This is a film about a seduce-and-destroy witch, shot on lavish 35-millimeter film, and sporting a mid-century ascetic recalling the goofy horror films of that era which I adore. I should love this film. Indeed, the fact that despite all these positive attributes the film remains a boring slog is almost an impressive feat in-and-of-itself. What’s more, all the little details are well thought out and skillfully executed. The set design, costuming, lighting, props, and effects are so stunning that it feels almost criminal that so much creativity and energy was marshaled for such a hopeless lost cause. Everything that can enhance a good script and skillful direction is on point here, but all of this is in service to a film that is flawed from the ground up. Gorgeous sets, costumes, and props serve as little more than a backdrop for a series of tedious dialogue sequences that go on for way too fucking long. Looking at The Love Witch feels like examining a scale model of the Imperial Japanese battleship Yamato. You can admire the craft and resources that took to build the greatest battleship ever made, but you can’t escape the looming tragedy of it. The war the Yamato was deployed in was a hopeless one, with Japan bogged down fighting an unwinnable war on land against China at the same time they were trying to challenge the sleeping colossus of the United States on the seas. Moreover, the ship itself was a relic of an earlier school of naval warfare, as battleships had already been eclipsed in importance by the new Aircraft Carriers. You think about what could have been accomplished with all this if only it were a different time, a different place, and feel a twinge of sorrow at the sheer waste of it all.

Also, like the battleship Yamato, there’s the creeping feeling that all this effort is being expended in support of a pretty fucked up ideology. I knew nothing about director Anna Biller before watching this film, besides that she and her work was considered feminist. Feminism is such a broad term, with so many different things claimed to represent the ideology that calling something feminist or anti-feminist is almost a meaningless distinction at this point. I don’t know whether the views on gender displayed in The Love Witch would be considered feminist or not, but they sure as hell feel bigoted and loathsome, not just to men but to women as well. This is a world where Men and Women are essentially two different species; men will always be driven by fantasy and logic while women will always be driven by love and emotion. There’s no room for individuals to break norms, go their own way, or even differ subtly from the rest of the herd. Not only are all men alike and all women alike, but any real understanding between the two is also effectively impossible. This theme isn’t even a sub-textual one, running along in the background and open to the audience’s interpretation, as the film regularly breaks its flow to lecture the audience for minutes on end about its gender politics. If real life were like this humanity would have gone extinct, I know that if I lived in the world Biller presents I’d probably have gone gay out of desperation.

I don’t demand that the films I view or the filmmakers who produce them match themselves to my world view. Birth of a Nation (1915) is a great film despite glorifying the Klu Klux Klan, and when compared to that film the philosophy of The Love Witch is downright palatable. The problem is that Birth of a Nation (1915) is a brilliant film with an odious ideological core, I can be swept away by the spectacle and the craft and separate that from all the political and ideological implications of what I’m watching. Moreover, while Birth of a Nation (1915) is not subtle about its political message it follows a strict policy of show don’t tell, leaving me to draw my own conclusions about the world onscreen. The Love Witch, by way of comparison is so dull I have nothing to distract me from the more morally questionable elements of the filmmaker’s ideology, and so ham-fisted that it regularly resorts to outright lecturing its audience. A touch of subtly would have gone a long way towards making this bearable.

The film’s plot description sounds like a grim-dark Seinfeld fanfiction: Elaine was dumped by her husband Jerry and then takes up with a coven of witches where she learns the power of feminine seduction and love potions. She also gets her revenge on Jerry by killing him off-screen before the film even begins. So right from the get-go, we’re already violating the old writing advice of “is this the most interesting period in your character's life? If not, why isn't the story about that instead?” The story Elaine going from wimpy housewife to vengeful seduce-and-destroy femme fatale would be a compelling arch. The film could culminate with the murder of her husband (who is evil presumably because he had the unmitigated gall to suggest she clean up the house occasionally). As it stands, instead the Elaine we get is a flat character, she’s already finished her arch from the first frame of the film and spends the rest of the film spinning her wheels. In the whole two-hour runtime, she does change, or grow, or transform in any meaningful way. The elaine in the first frame disposing of her husband’s corpse is identical to the Elaine at the climax sitting over the murdered body of her lover.

With her husband freshly murdered, Elaine moves to a new town where she turns her attention on a series of men. First up is a pretentious college professor burdened by the fact that he can never meet a woman who is both his intellectual equal and a knock-out. She feeds him hallucinogens (The Devil’s Weed!) which causes him to fall madly in love with her. Elaine seems faintly contemptuous of the professor after they consummate their affair, acting somewhat offended that he should dare to express his feelings to her. Sure, the professor is a clown, but you’re the one who drugged and seduced him lady, maybe you have some blame in his unstable mental state. The whole thing confused me, as up to that point I assumed that Elaine was being honest when she said she only wanted love, but now her actions and feelings made it clear that she was not interested in love so much as revenge on mankind for the actions of her shitty ex-husband. Elaine falls in love with a succession of men and finding a reason to off them when they fall short of her expectations of what true love is would be a mildly interesting concept, if somewhat unoriginal. However, this is the only guy that Elaine kills in this way. Her next lover just commits suicide after she dumps him and she only kills her final lover when he starts investigating her previous crimes. So, why kill the professor or Jerry for that matter (did he tell that stupid airline food joke one too many times)? The more you look at Elaine’s character, the less sense she makes. What does she want, love or vengeance?

Shaky plot and characters are the least of this film’s worries though. I’ve already mentioned the sluggish pacing, constant lectures, and boring dialogue sequences above, so I won’t repeat myself. However, they are not helped at all by the film’s interminable length (what is the modern fascination with 2+ hour horror films?). A more aggressive edit could have easily chopped this atrocity down to feature-length and would have greatly improved the experience. The film tries to spruce things up with a bit of humor occasionally, but aside from a couple of jokes, nothing lands effectively. Tellingly, the biggest laugh that the film elicited had more to do with my wife than the film itself. During the scene where Elaine makes a witch bottle with her tampon, my wife let out an audible “eww” right before Elaine’s voice-over narration cut in with its condescending lecture “There’s nothing gross about a used tampon.” Evidentially, it's not just men who are grossed out by second-hand sanitary products.

I suspect that part of the reason this film is so unbearably dull is that despite having an obvious love for horror movies, director Anna Biller doesn’t understand what makes them appealing to people. This is hardly surprising as Anna Biller is the sort of filmmaker that sees slasher films as “male fantasies of the sexualized and extremely graphic spectacle of the mutilation of women by men.” An absurd claim on the face of it, as almost all slashers have a mix of male and female victims, and a good deal of slasher films have women killers (Friday the 13th (1980) and Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (1988) to use examples from slasher films I’ve reviewed recently). I’m used to male victims in slasher movies being completely disregarded. After all, society largely sees men as disposable and reserves all their sympathy and handwringing for their female counterparts. What surprised me was Biller’s categorization of slasher movies as essentially violent pornography made for the enjoyment of men who want to watch women be chopped up into little pieces. Nobody watches slashers for this reason. If one were the sort of weirdo degenerate that got off to that sort of thing I’d imagine you’d be watching more niche horror films like Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985). No, the joy of watching slasher films is the joy of seeing a familiar formula unfold, the occasional flash of dark humor, and the practical gore effects that have sadly dropped out of vogue in recent years. Most people aren’t sadists, that is why the characters in slasher films are so often assholes, otherwise, viewers would be less willing to laugh at their grisly demises. The fact that Biller cannot understand this is troubling because it leads me to suspect that she’s projecting her own violent fantasies onto the majority of male viewers. After all, a thief is someone who thinks everyone steals, and therefore a sadist is someone who thinks everyone enjoys watching torture. The thrills that Biller gets from horror films are obviously different from the thrills most of us experience, and the extent to which she has Elaine excuse the murders she carries out is cause for concern: “I just drugged him it’s not my fault his heart couldn’t take it.” I don’t begrudge anyone their screwed-up fantasies, but I don’t particularly enjoy watching some pervert’s pseudo-sadistic fantasy, particularly when it’s as fucking boring as this film.

It surprised me to learn that after production wrapped, Anna Biller accused her crew of trying to sabotage the film. For one thing, it seems odd that paid professionals would deliberately harm a production they were attached to. Were it limited to lower-level crewmembers like grips or location scouts it would make sense, as these roles are not usually identified too heavily with their past work, even inside the industry. But Biller mentions that one of the saboteurs was the line producer, who would probably suffer some career blowback if the film was a total failure (or personal success if it was a huge hit). Moreover, if the crew was sabotaging the film I can see no evidence of it onscreen. Sure, the whole film looked like it was a low-budget movie from 1965, but that was clearly the filmmaker’s intention. Moreover, the sets, props, and costumes were all spectacular, to the point where I could hardly believe. The only problems I had with the film were the dull script and tedious directing, both of which could be laid squarely at the feet of the writer/director herself. Biller explains the tension by saying she suspects that some of the crew had an issue working with a female director, but if that were the case why did they agree to work on a film helmed by a woman in the first place? I was not on the set, so obviously I can neither confirm or deny Biller’s story but all the media outlets I’ve seen simply take Biller’s word for it #metoo style and don’t bother to reach out to any of the crew members. Obviously, there were some tensions on the set, but Biller’s account of them feels deliberately incomplete. Maybe it’s like she said, and they’re just a bunch of bigots who don’t like working with a female director. Maybe there was a disagreement about pay that left some of the crew working for less than they were promised. Maybe Biller leaves as much to be desired as a boss as she does as a filmmaker. I won’t comment further except to say there’s more to this story, and the outlets that ran a one-sided take on it are guilty of lax coverage at best and deliberate misinformation at worst.