The Love Witch
Feminist Rating: ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀ ♀
Overall Rating: ✮✮✮✮✮
The Love Witch is an hilarious, exciting, and supremely campy thriller that looks like a film from the past that deals with themes of the present. Anna Biller’s 2016 homage to Technicolor melodramas is saturated in color, drenched in spellbinding aesthetics, and shot in crisp 35mm. The Love Witch is love letter to femininity, witchcraft, campiness, gothic tales, b-movies of the 1960s, and bright blue eyeshaddow.
Elaine is the Love Witch and Samantha Robinson plays the title character with authority rarely seen in a breakout performance. The film begins with Elaine speeding down a highway in a 1960s red Mustang convertible with a lit cigarette in her hand. She tells the audience that she is moving on after a painful breakup but we don’t get the sense that it ended amicably. As she conveys her heartbreak via voiceover, we see flashbacks of a man drinking from a goblet in a red room before falling to the floor. This sets the tone for what is to come.
Elaine moves into a Victorian-style house in California which is owned by Trish (Laura Waddell) who meets her when she arrives. The two engage in a stilted conversation that feels clunky and awkward yet it aptly fits the film’s intended style which lends itself to the low-budget b-movies of the 1960s.
The two women go to a bright pink, Victorian teahouse and the aesthetics are almost disorienting. Considering that the film was written, directed, and edited by Biller (who was also responsible for production design and costume design) it’s very obvious that what we see is the sensibility and outlook of one person, namely Elaine. The world we see is her world how she sees it and she sees deep reds, bright pinks, and Victorian-style decoration that coincides with her desire for a passionate romance found in gothic novels.
The two speak to each other about witchcraft, love, and the patriarchy and Trish tells Elaine about her long relationship with her husband, Richard, but Elaine always steers the conversation back to herself and her own love life and her study of witchcraft. Elaine delivers the soon-to-be iconic line, “The day he left me was the day I died. But then I was reborn as a witch.”
Elaine doesn’t have any time to waste when it comes to finding a new man. She meets a handsome English professor named Wayne who is instantly smitten with her. She uses her potions to move the relationship along but its power works too well. Wayne goes insane with love and obsession for Elaine and becomes unbearably needy so she disposes of him without a hint of remorse. Despite this failure, she tries again with another man which leads to equally disastrous consequences.
Throughout the film, Elaine goes back and forth between hating the cluelessness and stupidity of men and also longing for a man to sweep her off her feet and never leave her. She falls in love with Griff, a cop, whose features are laughably masculine, like the men on the cover of an errotic romance novel.
The Love Witch is a study of love, romance, and narcissism as it relates to womanhood. The film borrows its surrealist style from directors such as Jean Rollin and Jess Franco and Biller skillfully delves into the eroticism and magical realism of their respective works. While Biller borrows the these qualities from the exploitation/thriller genre, with The Love Witch, she weaved her own tale of eroticism, sex, romance, and horror while also mixing in modern her own feminist ideas that defy the genre.
The Love Witch is more than just a retro-homage. It is a self-contained and self-realized study of female sexuality told with the help of deliberate campiness and enchanting aesthetics that will leave you bewitched.
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