The Love Witch

There’s a lot to be impressed by The Love Witch, and a lot you will feel left wanting for, and it isn’t for a lack of trying. First, I’ve got to tip the hat to the amazing visual, sound, direction, decoration, costuming, acting, and dialogue that so completely invoke the feeling of late 60’s-early 70’s technicolor campiness. Even though it’s betrayed with cell phones and computers and SUV’s (and copious full frontal nudity), somehow, the hairdos and manner of dress and decorations and just EVERYTHING feels like such a throwback, done in a loving way. Using blurry rear projection behind a car in a driving scene, or the lighting, or cross fades from one scene to another, it’s all so spectacularly done. It’s self-aware, but it’s never winking at you; there’s real reverence to it, and it does pull you in and hypnotize you. This movie has style to spare. I also commend it for touching on social topics like gender roles and sexual politics without being preachy or judgmental. This isn’t Black Christmas 2019 being insultingly blunt, or Initiation with its vacuous “gorsh, we really do be living in a society” platitudes. This explores gender roles in relationships, the imbalance between men and women in society, expectations in relationships, what men and women expect from each other, and how it can all turn toxic, on both sides. It never feels like a lecture, because it isn’t trying to get forth a position. It’s definitely more looking at the feminine side (it was written, produced, and directed by a woman, so, naturally), but it doesn’t cast all men as bad. In fact, it doesn’t cast ANY as bad. People are people here. That’s refreshing. Gender politics can be explored without resorting to binary hero/villain archetypes. But while this movie has intellectual depth and stylistic depth, it lacks one other kind of depth: storytelling. The movie clocks in at 2 hours, and has enough story for half that. Yup, the main character uses love magic and sex magic to make men love her because she has a hole inside her that can’t be filled, and the men die of broken hearts. You can drape the movie in as much style as you want, but that doesn’t hide that this movie keeps flying this plane around this one same runway over and over again, and refuses to either land or move on. The main character, Elaine, doesn’t have an emotional arc; she has a straight line that hits a speed bump in the last five minutes. And the movie doesn’t help itself by never feeling like it’s building to something; it ambles on at a pace that could generously be described as languid, which might be part of the retro appeal, but also robs the movie of tension. You’re left with a through line that’s more a circle — point A to point B and back to A — and you just end up feeling like, while a clever vehicle for the social commentary, the movie forgot it was a movie. In the end, what is left is a fantastic achievement in visual storytelling, and a smart look at gender politics, but a movie that resolutely can’t find a way to be very entertaining.