Likewise Sanford, all camp charisma and unmanageable hair, is from another time. Keys, with his ageless face of a man anywhere between 30 and 50, looks like he’s been transported in from a Hitchcock B-cast or mid-century noir. Robinson achieves a perfect balance between doe-eyed naivety and ferocious, sultry menace. Where free love and feminism meet, men corrupt it.Īlongside the technical mastery, casting is key. By arresting the male gaze, he asserts, the scantily clad female is at the peak of her power. Gahan (Jared Sanford) is a twisted would-be feminist who believes in empowering women by encouraging them to embrace (by which he means display) their physical beauty. When Griff calls her “my girl”, she questions by whose authority. Elaine’s impossible conflict is that she believes in giving a man everything he desires, but she is resistant to the idea of being possessed by a man. I have to work for your body, they would say, so therefore I have earned it. Rather, they are the unwitting beneficiaries of a system of patriarchy concealed behind the veil of female empowerment. Nor does she depict them as pure victims. Smartly, Biller does not depict Elaine’s male victims as basic dumb animals, thinking solely with their members. This is the tragedy of The Love Witch: Elaine is a proud and assertive woman who cannot be herself with anyone. Indeed, she cannot be honest with any of her men, because by the time the game of flirtation is over they are dead. She cannot be honest with Trish, whose husband she intends to seduce. Her coven demands that female sexuality be made public and free, while Elaine is a woman of private (and costly) passion. The deliberate melodrama in the delivery of dialogue throughout adds to the sense of insincerity.Įlaine can be sincere with no one. So, straight away Elaine is an unreliable narrator. But visually we see a different truth: he was poisoned by her love potion. Elaine relays the story of her ex as if he chose to leave her. It is immediately apparent that this is not a simple fable about a lonely woman searching for true love. Questions about the purpose of beauty arise: For whom does Elaine look beautiful? Is it for the men she seduces? Or the women she impresses, whom she plunges into jealousy? If it is for herself, why can’t she stand to be alone? Even Trish, a somewhat dowdy and obedient wife up to that point, is seduced by Elaine’s cosmic, cosmetic narcissism. Instead it expertly pastiches a former generation of filmmakers, and throws into the mix themes relevant to modern audiences.Įlaine, embodying some of the nu-feminism of the YouTube makeup tutorial generation, is unashamedly proud of her allure her sculptured model look. Just as a film like Space Station ’76 resurrected the look and sound and tone of its inspirations with genuine affection, The Love Witch never mocks its sources. What could have been unbearably kitsch somehow isn’t. The bold primary colours adorning the costumes and sets the blinding, multi-source studio lighting the narrated inner monologues and the employment of stagey medium shots, with the occasional crash zoom for effect. (Even more impressively, it isn’t even set in the period: watch closely for modern cars and mobile phones.) We find ourselves studying each scene for how they did it and ultimately we conclude that it’s through precision, skill, and attention to detail in all areas. ![]() What will strike you first about The Love Witch is the utterly authentic 1960s aesthetic. ![]() But will he be able to resist her charms? And will he be able to enter the witches’ coven and return alive? Inevitably, he will come face to face with Elaine. ![]() Meanwhile, a handsome police officer named Griff (Gian Keys) is investigating the disappearance of the men. The whimpering love they feel is literally killing them. ![]() She plies them with a love potion, leaving them to fall into a catastrophic post-coital comedown. Elaine begins seducing the men of the town. The ladies chat about men, and it quickly becomes clear that their views sharply diverge on the role of women, and what the love of a man means. There she meets Trish (Laura Waddell), an interior decorator. Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a recently-widowed witch who moves to California, into a grand old house owned by her fellow mystic, Barbara (Jennifer Ingram). If Viva was Anna Biller’s ode to 1970s sexploitation films, The Love Witch is the auteur’s loving – and really quite lovely – homage to the 1960s horror heyday of Hammer Films and Roger Corman. Funny, seductive, and in the end oddly moving, it may be the best indie horror movie since… well, since another indie horror movie with the words “The” and “Witch” in the title. Stars: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jared Sanford | Written and Directed by Anna Biller
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