mwilson1976 Review of The Love Witch

The Love Witch (2016)

She's the Love Witch baby, and she will love you like you love her.

[6/10 · 9 December 2019]

Here's a visually stunning movie that pays tribute to, and satirises the Technicolor occult thrillers of the '60s and early 70s. Elaine (Samantha Robinson), is a beautiful young witch determined to find the man of her dreams to fall in love with her. She lives in a gothic Victorian apartment complete with a laboratory where makes spells and potions, then picks up men and seduces them. But her spells work too well, leaving her with a string of dead victims. This movie embraces the camp of 1960s horror, and explores female fantasy and the repercussions of pathological narcissism. Director Anna Biller is a feminist filmmaker whose take on cinema is influenced by feminist film theory. She also wrote, edited, produced, and scored this bizarre movie, which goes beyond camp to ignite the pulpy surfaces of its tale and produce a smoke of bad-dream sexiness and scariness. Does it succeed? Well there's a lot going on, and it does kinda threaten to collapse under the weight of all of it's individual layers, meaning like a lot of the Love Witches unfortunate victims, this is not a potion fit for everyone, but for a select few looking for something different, the movie offers up some powerful magic.