Witch Hunt Review
Witch Hunt (2021) Film Review from the 28th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Elle Callahan, and starring Gideon Adlon, Elizabeth Mitchell, Abigail Cowen, Christian Camargo, Echo Campbell, Lulu Antariksa, Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Ashley Bell, Assaf Cohen, Bella Shepard, Anna Grace Barlow, Treva Etienne, Jess Varley, Regi Davis, and Taylor Ann Tracy. In a society where “witch hunt” has become a phrase of the reactionaries (particularly by powerful men to decry the substantial allegations of abuse lobbied against them), Elle Callahan’s new film Witch Hunt appropriately reclaims its true definition – literally and figuratively. Her mix of politics with low fantasy creates a metaphor for oppression in modern-day America, but it also muddies its own waters with less-than-desirable consequences.
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In this version of America witchcraft is a very real supernatural force, and the citizenry at-large downright despises it. In fact, the hatred of witchcraft is so extreme that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified to ban it outright – as well as the women themselves who possess its powers (the “gene” as it’s referred to, which doesn’t appear to manifest in men at all). A weaponized arm of law enforcement known as the BWI – the Bureau of Witchcraft Investigation – rounds up convicted witches for capital punishment by way of burning at the stake, and subjects its female populace to frequent invasive witchcraft tests (think the witch weight test from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but much more sinister). There exists an “underground railroad” of sorts that traffics witches out of the country, but the far reach of the BWI makes even this network’s existence a fraught one at best. In the American Southwest, close to the Mexico border, high schooler Claire (Gideon Adlon) is just trying to be a normal teenager and invite her friends over to hang out, but her mom (Elizabeth Mitchell) has made that difficult by converting their farmhouse to a stop on the witch refugee network. This fills Claire with anti-witch scorn and angst beyond the normal levels of teen moodiness, until a pair of redheaded sisters – the teenage Fiona and the young Shae (Abigail Cowen and Echo Campbell, respectively) – show up as a stop on their way to Mexico. Due to a snag in the network’s connections the sisters end up staying longer than expected, forcing Claire into closer proximity with her guests than she’s used to. Over time Claire starts to open up and reevaluate her own prejudices, particularly with Fiona as they both share a mutual feeling of adolescent ostracization. But the closer Claire gets with Fiona and Shae the more frequently strange occurrences begin happening around their house, and the harder it becomes for the family to hide their secret from suspicious townspeople – including a bloodthirsty BWI official (Christian Camargo) gunning for a full-on purge. From major allegories of systemic sexism and anti-immigrant rhetoric akin to The Handmaid’s Tale, to minor details like the genetics of magic and the witch-only portals that recall cultural giants like Harry Potter, Callahan works with familiar tropes to help flesh out her world. But similar to both of those properties, Callahan’s centering of white narratives ends up undercutting its own societal persecution metaphors. Yes, if we take witchcraft as femininity at its direct metaphorical correlation, then Witch Hunt’s depiction of America’s inherent misogyny is quite potent. When Claire must undergo an in-school test wherein her beauty marks are measured to make sure they’re not wart-like, it’s a shockingly evident representation of the ways in which women and AFAB people have their entire lives scrutinized (and even dehumanized) by all of society, merely for existing in it. But the filmmakers let their lack of symbolic understanding seep through as it’s mostly white women who are granted this particular “status” of the fantastical feminine. In the vein of Ana Cottle’s critique of The Handmaid’s Tale as a “White Feminist dystopia” – in which she points out how in her novel Atwood usurps the misogynistic violence forced upon Black women throughout history and applies it to white women instead, all the while effectively writing people of color out of the narrative – it’s hard to view Witch Hunt without thinking of its co-optation of the non-white experience. The particular inclusion of Black people as the primary transporters of these witches across this “underground railroad”-like network might’ve been set up with subversive intentions, but the narrative is not disconnected from the real world enough to warrant such disregard of historical weight in service of a fantastical reality. To make matters worse, the whole BWI-as-ICE allegory rings even more tone-deaf. It ignores the very real implications of racism and xenophobia at home, as well as imperialist violence perpetrated by the U.S. abroad that spurs its domestic issues on, and retools the trauma to show that, yes, white women in America have it hard, too. It’s but another mark in the tally of dystopian tales that show white people as the oppressed – and possibly even worse: the othering of fantastical beings (witches, in this case) to hammer home the very concept of racism/xenophobia – which only services Western chauvinism through white tears and manipulated sympathy. It’d be easier to overlook these issues if Callahan’s direction was a bit more striking, since that would also hide its assumed budgetary shortcomings (CGI fire and smoke is very hit-or-miss and in this case it was the latter), but she only offers momentary peeks into such a vision, which in turn undercuts the premise’s latent horror. A more complex bildungsroman for Claire and a more textured exploration of female friendship also exist in here, but unfortunately they remain trapped behind the film’s hollowed-out walls. Witch Hunt has the indie gumption of loaded genre fare, but it severely stumbles on its own elaboration. It doesn’t necessarily need to be burned at the stake, but it should definitely be left alone. Rating: 4/10 Leave your thoughts on this Witch Hunt review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. 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