If you’re looking for pace and excitement, then this film is not for you. Languid to the point of being in a stupor, the story concerns a reincarnated witch, Lise (Shelby Levington, excellent), who, three hundred years after her execution in Salem, is able to wreak her revenge on the descendants of her chief persecutor in modern day Staten Island.
Lise is attractive, intelligent, nonchalant, cool and sexy as hell. She starts by insinuating herself into
the family as a trusted friend, before callously killing the family’s teenage
son, and suspending his dismembered corpse in a plastic bag in a cupboard. She
then decapitates their teenage daughter and ‘helps’ their six year old girl fall
down the stairs to her death. All the while she wears black and pulls
sympathetic faces, supporting the family through their grief as she plans her
next diabolical move, building up to taking out the patriarch, a bumptious,
arrogant drunk who just happens to look exactly like the man who killed her all those
centuries ago.
Lise is not really a witch by deed:
she doesn’t cast any spells or hop about in the nude invoking the goat of
Mendes or Gaia or whoever or whatever witches invoke. In fact, there is no evidence
that she ever sticks a pin in anything. Lise is a witch by character, full of strength, resolve, defiance. Her mission is about revenge, pure and simple, executed with
strength and cold, relentless intent.
Right at the beginning of the film, Lise tells
the nerdy, doomed teenage son a long story about a primitive tribe where women
were the leaders and the hunters and the men merely acolytes and hand servants.
When the women were challenged by an alpha male, they pursued him through the
woods and, when they caught up with the upstart, tore him apart with their
hands and teeth for his impudence. It’s a mesmerising monologue, performed
well, and lets us know that she can’t stop, won’t stop in her mission, despite
the fact that, with the exception of the father, who is a real piece of work, the
rest of her victims seem ordinary, totally harmless, certainly undeserving of
death and misery and loss on the scale inflicted upon them. Their niceness is
irrelevant, however, Lise wants her pound of flesh, and isn’t bothered about how
she balances the scales.
A slow but quietly immersive film, reeking of comedown and 1971, that only
loses points towards the end by having Lise fall for a guy who bullies
her into loving him and thus diminishes her powers and her will to kill. As if.
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