Season of the Witch

I sat with this one overnight because I wasn't sure how to feel about it. It's an ambitious, peculiar mess of a movie, borne out of George Romero's desire to make a hard left turn from his most famous work, while making a far more direct and obvious statement instead of the subtle (and Romero would say non-existent) messaging of that most famous work. The story is fairly simple: it centers on Joan, a woman married almost 20 years, a mother, and a housewife, and she's unsatisfied with all of it. Tbhe daily routine is dull. Her marriage is unfulfilling. Her daughter is in her late teens, so her mother role is highly de-emphasized. As evident in a scene where her daughter pays her a compliment on her looks, she doesn't even consider herself a viable sexual being anymore. At a party, she meets someone new to the area who is a witch. This spurs on ideas and fantasies and desires in her, beginning a transformation. Romero described it as his "feminist" movie, and there's definitely cause for that adjective. The story of a woman seizing her lost identity and finding her self-worth is a strong feminist ideal. I'm not entirely sure he gets the messaging consistent across the movie's runtime, nor do I think all her choices contribute positively to feminism. For instance, her daughter runs away from home, and Joan's response is little more than idle boredom. She then has an affair with her missing daughter's on-and-off boyfriend. I'm all for the discovery of self and a woman having autonomy, but when the choices in the movie are inherently negative, I have to wonder if the movie's feminist message is being lost. The direction is, to say the least, awkward. Chalk part of that up to this only being Romero's third movie, I guess, but man, it can be weird. Sometimes for the good; the dream sequences are shot with uncomfortable camera angles and POV shots. You know they're dream sequences right away, which is good, because they just don't move like the rest of the movie. But the rest of the movie is awkward in its own way; blocking and lighting are haphazard, the sets look cheap (the whole movie looks cheap, really, and not in a grungy, grindhouse way, but in a cable access channel way), the pacing is bizarre, and the narrative is fractured. Those last two come down to something that isn't Romero's fault: the editing was done by the film distribution company, who wanted to try to market the movie as a softcore porn movie. It isn't softcore porn, it isn't even close -- I've seen sexier commercials -- but having non-professionals be your editors has an unavoidable consequence. The movie is chopped up to suit a purpose, not tell the intended story. There's all sorts of weird editing choices, like a scene where Joan is having either some kind of nervous breakdown or getting turned on by hearing her daughter have sex down the hall, and the camera keeps cutting from her writhing on the bed to a ceramic bull statue on the dresser. Or a scene where Joan looks at herself in the mirror before disrobing to get into the shower, slam cut to her belly-flopping on the bed, slam cut to later that evening. Or a scene shortly after the daughter goes missing, Joan's husband slaps her for not "kicking ass" over her daughter's reason for leaving ... and literally 20-30 minutes later in real time, but what appears to be several days if not weeks later in the movie, he apologizes for slapping her. The editing is graceless, whipping you around in directions and giving you tiny snippets of things without context or purpose. The sense of time is all wrong here, and it turns the narrative into a game of Boggle with some of the letters missing. And yet, I found myself intrigued by the movie. Entertained is a strong word, and enjoying it is definitely left of the mark ... but I was never not interested in what was going on. I wanted to know what it was building to. It's editing-by-random and the consequences therein created a sort of narrative puzzle to work out, and for some reason, I didn't hate it. I don't know why or how, and I don't know that I could recommend it in good faith without a LOT of warning. But there's something provocative here. It is far from perfect. It is wildly uneven. But there's also a level of ambition here that I can't ignore.