This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Heathbulich’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Wanting What You Can’t Have
I was very moved by this particular film and was intrigued by its layout of horror. This is an intellectual, emotional, and psychological horror through and through. The first set of aspects of the film is a mind-bending ideological blend. The act of the mother locking her daughter away for fear of the witch taking her and, in turn, ending up feral and having no real life is terrifying in itself. The idea that this child’s whole being is stolen from her mother for fear of her being stolen by the witch is terrifying.
For me, this film takes an unexpected and intellectual turn, not focusing on cinematic horror and not using menacing gore, jump scares, or brutal scenes. Instead, it focuses on the girl and how much her childhood traumatized her and affected her life. In my opinion, the mother witch gives up on this girl, essentially killing her mother and ruining her life so far for nothing. It seems that the mother witch wants something she is not supposed to have: a purpose or a sense of being and something that loves her or she can love.
I feel this is now where the movie I thought would take a turn for the better but keeps wrenching from a horror standpoint. Mother witch has to watch as this feral worthless to her child gets what she could never have. She was tricked into a marriage that turns into her being burned at the stake, and yet none of this happens to the girl she abandons. It’s a genius of psychological horror.
In closing, the young witch, it would seem, can achieve everything the mother witch ever wanted and more, so in a final fell swoop, she decides to take from her the one thing she could never achieve: happiness. She had learned what it was like to be free; she had experienced the woman’s and the man’s roles and relived the child’s role, finally becoming someone who had found someone she loved with purpose. The act of having to change her baby into a witch, I feel, signifies that the cycle of horror would continue. This is an absolute intellectual horror at its best.