Director: Aaron Fradkin
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Witchcraft
Plot:
Investigating his supposedly cursed house, a man and his filmmaker friend look over the property trying to dispel the rumors of a witch said to live in the basement, revealing their involvement in a centuries-old witch’s curse on the family and must stop it before it consumes them.
Review:
Overall, this was a fairly enjoyable genre effort. One of the more enjoyable factors found here is a rather solid and intriguing storyline that gets an immensely complicated and intriguing story pretty well. The anthology format of this one telling the story of the witch being in the house the entire time over several decades and tormenting the family at various points in special encounters makes for a highly effective showcase for how the various encounters play out. Rather than skipping around the individual beats in a nonlinear fashion constantly cutting away to the family members meeting their fates at the hands of the witch at different points in the story that fill in the void of what’s going on, the solidarity of keeping things straight and cleared away so everything plays out before moving on to the next encounter at a different point in time makes everything flow together far better.
That provides the kind of setup where the interactions with the witch make for some really enjoyable scenes throughout here. The idea of the witch coming across as a highly intelligent being using her surroundings to lure victims down into her level and then stalk them through the darkened surroundings of the basement which works rather nicely, all has come together into a solid series of encounters. The initial situation in the house where the witch attacks the child with some supernatural manipulation or the secondary issue involving the filmmaker feeding the friend to the beast sets off some generally chilling sequences that work to its advantage quite well. Later scenes here involve more overt taunting or mentally tormenting a victim in the house with visions of doppelgangers performing unwarranted actions. It has a great touch to things, and combined with the great make-up work on the witch gives the film some nice positives.
There are some issues to this one that hold it back. The majority of these factors are based on the final act which falls quite heavily compared to the previous segments as everything makes less sense for how it all plays out. That takes a rather formulaic idea of the neglected wife starting to grow suspicious of the husband and what he’s doing which is all the result of the witch’s influence over her as part of her game which renders everything all the more troubling with how the cliched plot plays out as a result. There’s also the unfortunate inability to learn much about the main witch due to the focus on episodic storytelling that never provides a chance to learn more about it or its main purpose, leaving everything rather confusing with this lack of origin information about it. These all give the film a bit that holds it back.
Overview: ***/5
An intriguing if somewhat troubled genre effort, this one has a lot to like while still being somewhat underwhelmed by some big issues that are enough to lower this one overall. Give this a shot if you’re a fan of this type of genre effort or are intrigued by this one while most others out there might want to heed caution with this one.
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