2016 Directed by Anna Biller
Elaine, a beautiful young witch, is determined to find a man to love her. In her gothic Victorian apartment she makes spells and potions, and then picks up men and seduces them. However her spells work too well, and she ends up with a string of hapless victims. When she finally meets the man of her dreams, her desperation to be loved will drive her to the brink of insanity and murder.
Say hello to your new obsession: A spellbinding homage to old pulp paperbacks and the Technicolor melodramas of the 1960s, Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” is a throwback that’s told with a degree of perverse conviction and studied expertise that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. Shot in velvety 35mm and seen through the lens of a playfully violent female gaze, the film follows a beautiful, narcissistic young sorceress named Elaine (Samantha Robinson, unforgettable in a demented breakthrough performance) as she blows into a coastal Californian town in desperate search of a replacement for her recently murdered husband. Sex, death, Satanic rituals, God-level costume design, and cinema’s greatest tampon joke ensue, as Biller spins an archly funny — but also hyper-sincere — story about the true price of the patriarchy. There hasn’t been anything quite like it in decades.
the love witch™: "goddess, please, send me a beautiful, sweet man to love me as i love him."
me: can't relate
the love witch™: "in the end, we're all just compost anyway. everything regenerates. i'd like to come back as a cat."
me: can relate
i honestly dont know how i feel about anna biller after reading this (i disagree with.. a lot of what she posits... like ??? & everything after the highlighted bit reads as nonsense to me and there's a whole lot more where that came from in the post but thats just my 2c) but her sense for production design is truly unparalleled.. this movie is beautiful - the costuming, set design, lighting, casting (especially of those "handsome" imo fugly ~all-american~ white dudes who mirror the men that often show up as protags and occasionally love interests in women-centered sexploitation and horror of the era she mimics) are all perfectly evocative of 70s genre films and i think what differentiates her from…
near the end there, i was ALMOST asleep because of how tired i am right now, but then she did THAT™ and i woke RIGHT the fuck up
This was probably one of the most mesmerizing films I've ever watched and had some sexy scenes, but it was also aggravating a lot of times too. The middle of the film and the last fifteen minutes were long and it felt stretched out and repetitive, there was a lot of bad acting (although some going well into the aesthetic, most of it was flat out terrible), and 95% of the 'witchcraft' or 'Wicca' they were calling the 'magick' was completely false and just fed into more stereotype (which was probably the most annoying part for me).
The 60s film aesthetic was to die for though.
i do have to applaud the effort for making it look so much like a 60's movie
I watched this with a then girlfriend and I'm pretty sure it was downhill for us from there.
Classic giallo aesthetics and modern gender politics mixed together in a cauldron with homages, jokes, and a lot of bright colors. Wonderful.
This is Lana del Rey's biopic before fame. You can't convince me otherwise.
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