Film Review: THE WITCHES (2020): Zemeckis’ Grounded Take on Roald Dahl’s Fantastical Tale is Full of Hope, Resistance, and a Fair Amount of Nightmare Fuel

The Witches Review

The Witches (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Jahzir Kadeem Bruno, Stanley Tucci, Josette Simon, Jonathan Livingstone, Miranda Sarfo Peprah, Joseph Zinyemba, Oral O’Rourke, Codie-Lei Eastick, Vivienne Acheampong, Ken Nwosu, Charles Edwards, and the voice work of Kristin Chenoweth and Chris Rock.

Crafting good horror is no easy task … much less kid-friendly horror … much much less kid-friendly horror that’s already been done to such previous success. And yet Robert Zemeckis has pulled it off with The Witches, the second cinematic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 novel of the same name, in a way that lends new insight to the source material and will scare a whole new generation.

Transporting the primary action from modern-day Norway and Britain to Alabama of the late 1960s, The Witches opens with our young protagonist (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno) as the sole survivor of a car crash that renders him an orphan. After being taken in by his level-headed yet superstitious grandmother (Octavia Spencer), the boy remains cloistered and distant. But after some patient coaxing (and his grandma’s gift of a pet mouse who he aims to turn into a rodent acrobat), he slowly begins to crawl out of his emotional shell. His recovery grinds to a halt when he crosses paths with a mysterious and threatening woman (Josette Simon), whose appearance sets off a series of health issues with his grandmother. It’s then that she suspects the unknown woman to be a witch, and – after filling the boy in on her foreknowledge of witches’ existence and their absolute disdain for all children – hightails the both of them into hiding at a luxurious seaside resort.

Thinking they’re safe the pair let their guard down, only to miss the coven of witches who enter right after them – led by none other than the most powerful witch in the world, the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway). Through some accidental espionage the boy discovers her mouse-centric plot to exterminate all the children in the world, and is unfortunately thwarted before he can escape to warn everyone. Now newly mouse-ified, the boy and his new rodent friends must find his grandma and convince her to help them stop the Grand High Witch before she can carry out her dastardly plans.

It’s impossible to not compare Zemeckis’ take to its predecessor from 30 years before. Any late GenXer or millennial whose parents were less-than-stringent about their childhood media consumption surely got a glimpse of that Nicolas Roeg-directed adaptation at some point: an ostensible “kids” film with a disorienting sense of manic energy and Henson-produced visuals, guaranteed to sear itself into your cerebral cortex for all of eternity. Even despite the rough patches in its plotting and pacing, it still has a sense of whimsical charm. But like most secondary Dahl adaptations the new Witches is keenly aware of the cultural prominence of its predecessor, so Zemeckis and screenwriters Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro walk that fine line between crafting a straight-up homage and an entirely new vision.

To the latter point: whereas Roeg’s adaptation leans into the novel’s lore (as well as an extreme sense of ambiguity) to create an unsettling tone, Zemeckis espouses the narrative’s underlying trauma to generally the same effect. The inciting action and expository background are swapped places right from the get-go, immediately plummeting us into this sense of anguish and dread. While that may sound like a recipe for overwrought melodrama, Zemeckis, Barris, and del Toro temper its prevalence with moments of heartfelt emotion (carried primarily by Spencer with her down-to-earth, no-nonsense performance). Doing so not only compliments the moments of horror that’s sure to provide nightmare fuel for a burgeoning new wave of cinephiles (Hathaway in witch form clawing the boy out of a vent by his face is … unsettling, to say the least), but it also amplifies the story’s themes of hope, perseverance, and optimism in the face of insurmountable odds. It also ends on a note of continuous but hopeful resistance rather than the former’s wish-fulfilling happiness, which lends it a refreshingly grounded sense of being. Despite its fantastical setting, it feels surprisingly real.

Although, in some spots both films fall into the same traps. The witches as a metaphor are vague to an extreme, becoming a bit of a Rorschach test based on the individual viewer. Sure, they are a very general representation for the aforementioned concepts of trauma and life’s inescapable hardships, but both Roeg and Zemeckis’ witches seem to be hinting at something that’s never really fleshed out. Via Huston’s performance, Roeg’s film might’ve been making a subtle comment on Nazism/fascism’s aim of stamping out progressive movements (through the quite literal stamping-out of the youth – the demographic of whom those in power like to remind us are more prone to radical politics in the first place). Zemeckis’ adaptation switches out that allegory for one about the racism and inequality of the Jim Crow era in the American South. It’s not that both versions are attempting to draw thematic through lines that makes either of them play as disappointing, but rather that they’re ultimately so listless in their doing so that the symbolism begins to feel more like window dressing than anything else. Zemeckis’ version in particular feels like a missed opportunity for historical excoriation, which cheapens and undermines its setting as a result. (Hathaway’s decision to resurrect Huston’s German accent as opposed to leaning into, say, a Southern drawl, might check off the homage box but doesn’t quite fit into the rest of this retelling’s thematic cues.)

Yet it should be stated of how attuned Zemeckis is to his younger audience’s intelligence and tolerance of both the scary and the surreal. The Witches’ playfully frightening tone feels akin to his 1992 camp classic Death Becomes Her, and in a similar fashion he impeccably threads the needle between the goofy and the unnerving (with a spattering of discomforting body horror, as well). He also solves the original’s pacing issues, which in turn make this feel less like a slice-of-life story but also one that’s more narratively contained. It may not place in his top-tier, but Zemeckis has nonetheless crafted a product that’s neither bureaucratically defanged nor inappropriately excessive.

The Witches may vary in its personal impact, but it’s undeniably fun – an all-ages romp with action and scares aplenty. If, like me, you missed it for your Halloween marathon this year, be sure to put it in your future queues.

Rating: 6/10

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