Movie Review: The Love Witch (2016)
The Love Witch is a surrealistic technicolor fantasy/horror film written and directed by Anna Biller. It stars Samantha Robinson (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as a witch named Elaine who is moving from San Francisco to a quiet town in an effort to start anew after her husband had left her, and will do whatever it takes to find perfect love.
This film is very impressive in a lot of ways. It was actually filmed in 35mm Technicolor which gives it that old-school look and feel that a lot of horror films in the ’60s or ’70s had, stylistically. A lot of films try to replicate this by using digital effects, but don’t even come close. The acting also managed to capture that very well, and it’s possible that the reason Robinson was chosen for her role in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is because she did such a fantastic job in this film. A lot of the atmosphere was also complimented by a great soundtrack. Anna Biller herself composed a lot of the renaissance style of music in the film.
The witches in this film are known to exist by the locals and are not well-received. The townspeople accept them, but it seems like there is a grey area as far as their places in society go and they are outcasts. Elaine isn’t the only witch in town, either. Elaine confides in other witches about her love spells and complications, and they warn her that they won’t work the way she expects them to, but she ignores these warnings and as expected, things get way out of control quickly, and in deadly ways.
Overall, The Love Witch is a very enjoyable film. It is definitely not what you would typically expect from something made in 2016. Everything from the 35mm Technicolor presentation to the great acting, and just managing to make a solid film about witches was great. The only thing we would have liked more is if they had written it to stay within the time period that it was trying to replicate. It seemed to be pretty arbitrarily written in that sense. The presentation was all retro, but there were modern things mixed in there like cellphones, and it seems like somewhat of an odd decision to focus so much on the presentation of this retro dynamic, and then step outside the boundaries of that presentation with things like modern cars and technology.
Witches are a very underrepresented subgenre of horror. There are only a handful of absolute classics, but there is such potential that it’s not often you see a good one that manages to get witches right, and this one did a good job. We would definitely recommend that you give this one a watch if you are into old-school technicolor films, or just want to watch a different take on witches.
Check out the trailer below, and give this a watch. It’s available free with your Amazon Prime subscription.
