Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Brooklyn’s branch of the Alamo Drafthouse cinema — that Austin export theater chain that boasts a boutique cinema experience for audiences who know their Antonioni from their Miyazaki — had just opened when I first saw the trailer for director Anna Biller’s The Love Witch. And given my surroundings, I mistook the trailer for one of the Drafthouse’s many classic, campy movie trailers from the ’60s. It was the perfect setting — and the perfect trailer — to have me fooled.
With its saturated technicolor palette, 35mm presentation, and heightened acting style, The Love Witch presents as a perfect re-creation of a campy, low-budget ’60s horror film. Exactly the kind of movie that gets resurrected by independent theaters for midnight screenings hosted by John Waters or someone of similar bone fides. As an exercise in genre replication, The Love Witch is a perfect and delightful little piece of work. From the very first frames — featuring the titular love witch, Elaine (Samantha Robinson), driving down a sunny highway, rear-screen projection behind her, delivering a voice-over thesis about the men she’s killed and the trouble she’s fleeing — the movie has its style language nailed, and it doesn’t stop from there. The dialogue is heightened, the acting is broad and stilted, the colors are aggressive — a movie like The Love Witch makes all your campy group-viewings of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls totally irrelevant.
The stylistic flashbacks to ’60s horror are the perfect setting for Biller’s story of violent, sexually explicit feminism. Elaine presents herself as a witch from the break, but everything she does is for love. She casts love spells on a series of men, and one by one, they fall for her, disappoint her, and end up dead in some way or another. The Love Witch‘s feminism doesn’t lie in Elaine’s power over these men, though. The movie is relentless in the ways in which it presents the bone-deep fear and punishment of female sexuality. Tales of witch-burning have long since become shorthand for this kind of fear of the feminine mystique, but Biller and Robinson, working at the same cauldron in perfect sync, don’t ever let the audience lose sight of the fact that Elaine’s witchcraft is her reaction to a patriarchy that pushes her into into gender roles and then punishes her for acting out her desires from within those roles. It’s honestly a pretty muscular message for a movie that is so aggressively stylish.
You just wish that all that attention that was lavished on the style and themes of the movie could have been replicated onto the plot. Scenes drag on forever and meander through a quasi-coherent plot in which Elaine commits murders and comes closer and closer to getting caught, both by a dully handsome detective and by townsfolk who are very upfront about their witch-hatred. There’s also a subplot involving Elaine’s coven and its hierarchical politics that honestly could have been great if it was better cultivated.
And yet, even with those shortcomings, The Love Witch is an incredibly satisfying exercise in using the visual language of cinematic history in order to tell a heightened story about female power in a world that is hostile to it.
