The Love Witch

Description

The Love Witch uses the figure of the witch as a metaphor for women in general, as both an embodiment of men's fears of women, and of women's own innate powers of intuition and as mothers and sorceresses. The lead character of the film is a young woman who uses magic to make men love her. Her character is an examination of the femme fatale archetype. The film embraces the camp of 1960s horror, examining issues of love, desire, and narcissism through a feminist perspective. Anna Biller is a feminist filmmaker whose take on cinema is influenced by feminist film theory.

The film is highly stylized with elaborate set and costume design and a color palette to match the aesthetic of Technicolor. It imitates a 1960s look, although the story is set in the present day and features modern cars and mobile phones.

Plot

The film opens with Elaine, a beautiful young witch, driving to Arcata, California to start a new life after the death of her husband Jerry. It is heavily implied that Elaine murdered him. Once there she rents a room in a Victorian home owned by Elaine's mentor Barbara and kept up by its interior decorator, Trish Manning. In an attempt to befriend the young woman Trish takes Elaine to a teahouse, where she's met by her husband Richard, who is instantly besotted with Elaine after meeting her gaze. Hoping to find a new lover, Elaine performs a ritual to find a new man and soon meets Wayne, a literature teacher at the local college.

The two travel to Wayne's cabin, where she gets him to drink a concoction containing hallucinogens. The two have sex, after which Wayne becomes emotional and clingy, which proves to be a turnoff for Elaine. He dies the next day and Elaine buries his body along with a witch bottle. She decides that the next man she will try to seduce will be Richard. While Trish is away, Elaine invites him over to her apartment, where she also serves him a concoction. Afterwards Richard becomes obsessed with Elaine, causing her to break up with him.

Unbeknownst to Elaine, one of Wayne's colleagues has reported him missing, leading to police officer Griff to investigate and discover Wayne's body and Elaine's witch bottle. He traces it to Elaine but falls in love with her and initially refuses to believe that she would be capable of murder, much to the ire of his partner Steve. Elaine shares his love and believes him to be the man of her dreams, even going so far as to hold a mock wedding with her coven at a renaissance faire.

Meanwhile Richard, morose, kills himself in his bathtub, where he's discovered by Trish. Despondent, Trish invites Elaine to tea again and tries on a ring that Griff gave Elaine during their mock wedding, only to forget to return the ring to Elaine. Trish decides to leave the ring inside Elaine's apartment but in doing so discovers a shrine to Elaine's dead lovers—and that her husband was one of them. She's discovered by Elaine and the two fight before Trish leaves the apartment. Elaine then goes to the cabaret to meet Griff, who confronts her over the deaths of Wayne and Richard. He tells her that she is tied to both of them by DNA evidence left in Wayne's witch bottle and that the items Trish gave him implicate her in Richard's suicide. Despite his earlier love, Griff is unwilling to let Elaine go unpunished. Their conversation is overheard by the cabaret patrons who are prejudiced towards witches and try to harm Elaine. Griff helps her escape, and the two return to her apartment where she stabs him to death.

Cast

Production

The Love Witch is one of the last films to cut an original camera negative on 35mm film. It was the only new (non-repertory) feature film presented at the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam on 35mm film. The film was lit and shot to look like a 1960s Technicolor film. Anna Biller designed the sets and costumes to emulate the style of classic Hollywood films, and collaborated closely with her cinematographer M. David Mullen, who is an expert on period cinematography and who has been nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, to create the hard lighting style characteristic of such films. For the driving scenes, rear projection photography was used to give glamor to the lead actress, and in tribute to the opening of the Hitchcock movie The Birds.

The actors also played their parts in a classic presentational acting style, with lead actress Samantha Robinson receiving accolades for her stylized performance.

Critical response

The Love Witch received positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 97% based on 86 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's consensus reads: "The Love Witch offers an absorbing visual homage to a bygone era, arranged subtly in service of a thought-provoking meditation on the battle of the sexes."

In a review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote, "Ms. Biller's movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What's underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself."

The Love Witch is listed as #40 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the Top 100 Horror Movies. It also made Rolling Stone's list of the top 10 Horror Movies of 2016, The New Yorker's list of the Best Movies of 2016, and Indiewire's list of The Best Movies of 2016.

Awards

The Love Witch won in a tie for the Trailblazer Award and Best Costume Design at the Chicago Independent Film Critics Circle Awards, and also won the Michael Cimino Award at the American Independent Film Awards. The Dublin Film Critics' Circle awarded M. David Mullen Best Cinematography for The Love Witch. A. O. Scott mentioned Anna Biller as worthy of receiving an Academy Award for best original screenplay for The Love Witch in a New York Times editorial.