Review of The Love Witch (2016) by Fairbrother — 19 May 2017

An aesthetic wet-dream with an irresistibly seductive leading lady, The Love Witch may well be, but in dramatic terms it's a grinding bore. Full credit to writer-director-designer Anna Biller for owning absolute control of her feature debut, which one can easily believe was pre-conceived within an inch of it's life, but for all the fetishistic swoon factor of faithfully relocating mid-'60s style and mood into a nominally contemporary setting, she can't (yet) dramatize or properly edit a scene to save herself.

As a result, it goes on forever, while the tongue-in-cheek attitude is so unbearably arch it leaves the actors stranded in a joking-but-not-joking limbo. There are a few good laughs, especially in an early sequence where our titular spellbinder goes home with her first conquest, but not enough.

And, even making allowances for "subversion of genre", horror-fans will find it irredeemably fright-free.