Review of Season of the Witch (2011) by Shiira — 13 Jan 2011

Tituba's "Barbados songs" are best left to the imagination, but in Nicholas Hytner's adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 play "The Crucible", we see the black woman conjuring spells over a cauldron; we also see her disciples, languishing New England schoolgirls, who have gathered in the woods by moonlight for this secret assemblage with the expressed interest of quelling their unrequited passions, once and for all.

Into the pot does each girl make her contribution to the love potion, mostly harmless fauna and flora, except for Abigail Williams(Winona Ryder), who brings a live chicken to the estrogen-heightened proceedings.

Abigail smashes the bird on a rock, then smears the fowl's blood on her lips. In "Season of the Witch", a principled knight who leaves the Crusades(along with his pal Felson, played by Ron Perlman) after ruminating over the morality of killing innocent women and children(it finally hits him: hey, it's wrong!), dreams about his last victim(a woman that he speared in the chest), and in this delirious reenactment, she feasts on the blood gathered around her mouth, just like Abigail.

Did the conscientious objector conjure this image on his own, or did the girl in the cage(Claire Foy), the alleged witch, put it there? John Proctor(Daniel Day Lewis) didn't believe in necromancy, and neither does Behman, which is how he allows himself to be manipulated by Anna, who convinces the runaway knight that the priest, Deblezar(Stephen Campbell), is the enemy.

In this world, fourteenth century England, the church's hysteria, concerning the devil and the threat he poses to the inhabitants of the material realm, is warranted, because unlike the Massachusetts of 1692, magic exists; witches walk among the English people, many of them, victimized by the Black Plague.

"Season of the Witch", as a result of having studied "The Crucible", plays topsy-turvy with the two camps: the accused(the women, the supposed witches) and the accusers(the church), when the film defies expectations when one of the sentenced women(in the film's opening scene), a confessor(unlike the Miller play, divulging one's guilt doesn't result in an automatic reprieve), turns into a demon after she is dragged out of the icy cold river water, the surprising aftermath of a public execution.

It wasn't a senseless killing, after all. Whereas the prologue in the Hytner film(written by Miller himself) suggests the possibility, however slight, that the devil did reside in Salem, which to a certain degree, justifies the micro-proselytizing of the theocratic officials, the church in this "Lord of the Rings"-meets-"The Exorcist" mash-up is seen as totally in their right to round-up potential occultists for their kangaroo court.

The witch hunt, with its allusions to McCarthyism, makes "Season of the Witch" a sort of apologist film for the red scare tactics plied by the U.S. senator on many Hollywood professionals in the nineteen-fifties, since the woman in the opening scene, and Anna, indeed do have something to hide.

The church, so often portrayed as a patriarchal construct whose sole purpose is to keep robed men in power, in this otherwise forgettable and routine film, is seen as a heroic institution, vital even, since superstition(the root cause of all that goes wrong in John Proctor's world), in this cinematic domain, becomes almost indistinguishable from empirical observation.

The devil isn't a psychological entity, something conjured up in the mind's eye of Abigail Williams, but rather, it's a physiological one, as seen in the monastery, home to the Key of Solomon(a book of incantations that contains a spell to break the plague), when the devil breaks loose from the girl's body.