Review of The Witch

This one seems to pick up on the Bavaesque idea to stage a psychothriller in a lavish but rundown Roman villa—a terrific set with a labyrinthan Orson Wellesian quality--and includes some chase scenes reminiscent of Bava too. The plot involves Sergio answering a want ad for a scholar to reorganize an old library (as in the Hammer Dracula), by an old women and her here-one-minute-gone-the-next, and extremely beautiful daughter. The main problem is it took me about five minutes to figure out what was going on, then I had to sit through another 90 minutes of Richard Johnson not being able to figure what it all meant. Let's see, a reclusive old woman, rare flowers, magic tea, dead cats, a daughter who only appears now and then, then mimics the gestures of the old woman. And yet he just doesn't get it. It's OK when horror movie characters are a bit dumb, but to be utterly clueless stretches one's patience. This movie also blundered badly by trying to fill up a horror movie framework with psychological thriller soap-opera argumentations ad infinitum and, some of which, involving a male librarian already trapped in the old women's employ, are unwatchably tedious (had to hit the fast forward button a few times). Here and there, some sequences work, like when Johnson has to remove Aura's dress no hands allowed, or a very weird bathing sequence or the final scene, but generally a fatal case of genre confusion. Not watchable except for spelunkers after Italian movie witches (but this one is far downhill from Argento's Suspira and even the fairy tale witches in movies like Lucifera).