WITCH HUNT (March 2021)

WITCH HUNT

(March 2021)

/ ‘wiCH, hunt/, Noun

1. A search for, and subsequent persecution of persons accused of witchcraft.
2. A campaign directed against a person, or group, holding unorthodox or unpopular views, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.

Witch Hunt’s harrowing opening quickly tips the viewer off to the fact that they’re now in the middle of an alternate history:
 
A world where witches are real, and are hounded by the Bureau of Witch Investigations (the BWI), modern-day witch hunters all too ready to strike a match so they can “stop hysteria and uphold the law”;
 
A world where the threat of Proposition 6, the Witch List Act (AKA Prop 6) looms.
Its full title: the Control, Regulate, and Restrict Potential Witchcraft Act, meant to “restrict the rights of blood relatives of convicted witches”;
 
A world where the particular combination of one’s genes potentially carries a death sentence.
 
Working against this system is Elizabeth Mitchell’s Martha Goode, a widow who helps smuggle witches to safety.
In this world’s parlance, Martha is a “harborer”, which makes her life and that of her children a daily tightrope of secrets and subterfuge.
 
“Did you see the way that they looked at me? How am I supposed to control something that I’m not even allowed to practice?
“And why does it have to be bad?
“I’m not bad…
“I’m not bad!”
 
Witch Hunt is writer/director Elle Callahan’s sophomore feature, on the heels of her excellent ¡Qué horror! 2019 title, Head Count.
It’s a brilliant and powerful follow-up that brings a very different kind of horror from that of Head Count, to the screen.
 
A piece like Witch Hunt can be a particularly potent narrative because, like comic book tales of the X-Men, it’s the kind of story where the persecuted minority--whether witches or mutants--can be swapped out for any number of real-life discriminated groups.
It’s a fictional reflection of the hardships that some people--through no fault or choice of their own--are subjected to, simply due to the color of their skin, or their gender.
 
It’s the kind of troubling, uncomfortable horror that critiques the very real-life systems we all find ourselves slaved to.
It’s the kind of horror that asks, So then, what are you going to do about it?
 
“So, vote ‘Yes’ on Prop 6, and keep our streets safe from anyone with magic in their blood.
“No magic is good magic.”
 
(Witch Hunt OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

LA TERZA MADRE
(MOTHER OF TEARS:
THE THIRD MOTHER)
(Review)
If you haven’t read my reviews for the first two chapters of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy—Suspiria and Inferno—you may do so right now, as some of my comments in the review below could reference them. (Both reviews can be found in the Archive.)
I met the Three Mothers and built three houses for them, one in Freiburg, one in New York, and one in Rome.
I discovered too late that these houses hide obscene secrets: it is from here that the Sisters spread pain, tears, and darkness throughout the world.
-- The Three Mothers by E. Varelli

A foreboding discovery at Viterbo Cemetery finds its way to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, where Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) becomes inextricably linked to the blood-drenched storm of chaos fast approaching, as Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears (Moran Atias), makes her bid to reign over the world of man.

It was with this premise that “The Three Mothers” trilogy finally came to a close last year, a full three decades after it kicked off in Dario Argento’s classic work of phantasmagoric cinema, Suspiria.
After all this time though, I’d honestly thought the trilogy would never be completed, since the director’s close personal and collaborative relationship with Daria Nicolodi (who forged the mythology behind the films with Argento) had been severed long ago.
There was, however, one very concrete and substantial link between them: their daughter, Asia.
It’s quite possibly that aspect of La Terza Madre that is the most noteworthy, that it is, in a manner of speaking, an ersatz family reunion.
Beyond that however, the film itself is a rather muddled and dissatisfying affair.


There’s a strange perfunctory air to the proceedings here, as if—as seemed to be the case with Inferno—Argento (who co-scripted his story with Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch) is going through the motions of serving up some of what he feels the audience may expect from a “Three Mothers” film.
The gruesome, gory deaths are here. The sinister score is here (by Claudio Simonetti, who’d also worked on the Suspiria score). The convenient exposition is here (some of which is provided by the one and only Udo Kier, as exorcist Father Johannes).
What is sorely lacking though, aside from the brazen, visual flair of Suspiria, is any sort of genuine menace and urgency, and a main protagonist worthy of our sympathy and respect.


To begin with, Sarah, though a character intimately tied to the “Three Mothers” mythology, seems a lukewarm lead. She’s largely ignorant of her role in the grand scheme of things, and even though she’s given a crash course of what she’s capable of (by Nicolodi, in the little screen time she’s afforded), Sarah never really comes into her destiny in any significant way.
She really only displays one particular Jedi mind trick, neat though it is.
Mostly, there’s just bungling and much casting about from one resource person to the next, sneaking off shoeless into the night (so as to avoid detection by the film’s Evil Monkey; yes, La Terza Madre has one of those), and delivering a vaguely excruciating, half-hearted performance.
While I did like Argento's recent performance in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, here, she’s a bit of a mess. And the script doesn’t do her any favours either.


Her father, meanwhile, doesn’t really seem to inform La Terza Madre with any of Suspiria’s inspired “infernal atmosphere.” Even Inferno, which I really don’t much care for, had about it a transitory sense of an inexplicable nightmare.
All La Terza Madre can boast of having are the aforementioned gory deaths, some brief (and ultimately gratuitous) lesbian action, a brief (and ultimately gratuitous) shower scene, some nudity, and lots’a witches with wild hair and bad make-up.
There’s also a parade of Grand Guignol grotesqueries towards film’s end that plays like nothing so much as a low-rent carnival funhouse.
If however, that sounds like your kind of thing, well, the film’s got all that, and, oh yeah… the Evil Monkey.

If I’m sounding glib and snarky here, it’s only because this was such a disappointment.
I really was looking forward to Argento rediscovering the dark territories of his glory days.
But he messes it up here.
He flubs it with the script, which not only displays a distinct lack of anything remotely resembling tension, but also has characters like Detective Enzo Marchi (Cristian Solimeno, from TV’s Footballers’ Wives and Strictly Confidential) who don’t really add anything substantial to the mix, yet inexplicably seem to understand there is more here than meets the eye; characters who are largely off-screen, and yet conveniently surface in the film’s climax to play frustratingly negligible roles.
The film’s riddle (“What you see does not exist, and what you cannot see, is truth.”) and the house’s secret—narrative fixtures in a “Three Mothers” film—are also equally negligible, worse than merely being throw-away. And that’s saying a lot, considering those featured in Inferno weren’t all that substantial either.


La Terza Madre seems to be nothing so much as a catalogue of missed opportunities.
There’s never any real sense of a city tearing itself apart while under the malign influence of Mater Lacrimarum. What could have been disturbing set pieces of violence and carnage (think M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening or The Signal) merely wind up being haphazard, lackluster depictions of pseudo-mayhem. (Admittedly though, the two baby bits are quite nasty.)
Argento likewise misses out on a chance for some interesting narrative symmetry, choosing to end La Terza Madre by earth, instead of fire, which closes both Suspiria and Inferno.


Some of the casting choices are also somewhat dubious, as model turned actress Atias brings nothing (beyond her physical beauty) to the role of Mater Lacrimarum, and Jun Ichikawa (who plays Katerina, one of Mater L’s witchy lackies) is so glaringly over-the-top, it’s embarrassing. Not even the needlessly—and inexplicably—brutal method of dispatch Sarah uses on Katerina can make up for the truly awful performance.
And that curiously hysterical ending…
Talk about inexplicable and embarrassing.


I must apologize for the tone, truly.
But I really wanted this one to be good, not just so the trilogy could close triumphantly, but also because I’ve been waiting quite a while for Argento to once again make the cinema a dark and disturbing place where nightmares breed.
And maybe he’ll do that with his next effort, Giallo.
For now though, La Terza Madre is a distinct and resounding disappointment that merely makes the cinema a dark and sad place where dreams are gutted, and die rather messily.
Ironically enough, just like a victim in an Argento film.

(Mother of Tears OS and images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com and shocktillyoudrop.com.)

Thanx to Jeb, for bridging the language barrier.