The Book of the Witch (2024) | FindKey

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JPRetana

JPRetana

The Book of the Witch (2024) breaks an unwritten cardinal rule: outside of a comedy, no witch should ever wear a pointy hat in a movie. You shouldn’t make your villain “a witch that’s been around since 1692 during the Salem Witch Trials” either, because then you’re engaging in a form of cryptohistory. You’re retrospectively trivializing the persecution, scapegoating, and extermination of alleged undesirables based on false accusations and spectral evidence. I’m aware this is just a fictional horror flick. The Salem witch trials were real, though. There were no witches there, only innocent victims to whose injury you’re adding insult. To put it in perspective, you wouldn’t make a film in which Jewish people naturally spread contagious diseases as Nazi propaganda claimed they did. Moreover, just because Salem took place longer ago than the Holocaust and far fewer people died doesn’t mean it’s fair game — especially when your movie seems to argue that the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America fell short, given that at least one guilty witch got away. This particular witch (Ali Williams) lives “in the California desert, where she’s abducting people in order to steal their life force via human sacrifice so that she can cheat death.” What she does with her time other than prolong it is an unfathomable enigma. Without her, though, there would be no spell book, which is what the heroine, Victoria (Krishna Smitha), is after. Furthermore, the witch doesn’t technically sacrifice her victims. She turns them into “zombies” for which she has no discernible use. This pointless, half-baked development contributes nothing to the plot. Dropping the zombie angle was the first step toward trimming the runtime down to the short film that The Book of the Witch ought to have been all along. Monsters are more effective when there is a sense of mystery to them. The less you know, the more there is to fear. However, this shouldn’t be an excuse for plotholes. For example, Victoria’s friend, August (Danny Parker-Lopes), wonders how the witch made her way from Salem to California. This is a valid question for which there may be a reasonable, even prosaic explanation (by way of comparison, as powerful as Dracula is, he still has to deal with real estate agents). If you’re not going to devote a few minutes to address this gap, then you’re just giving the audience time to dwell on it. The Book of the Witch is a minimalist movie in budget, cast, setting, and story, but not in length. Even at an otherwise lean 70 minutes, it’s disproportionately long for what little truly solid material it has to offer.