dreamingfifi | The Season of the Witch (Reply)

So, I just watched The Season of the Witch.

I’m still trying to hash out what I think of this movie… but I’m pretty sure that I don’t like it.

The first thing I noticed was that the music was all wrong. The music is a bombastic, heavy, orchestral, with screaming choirs (imagine listening to the Nazgûl theme from LotR for 97 minutes) and very much NOT 1300s sounding. It’s hard to put my finger on why exactly it bothered me so much. Maybe it was because it didn’t match the emotions on screen, and never tried to build a setting. There should have been at least a little madrigal music in there, but there wasn’t. The music was flailing its arms and yelling, “This is epic, dammit!” but the problem was – it wasn’t. “Epic” is thousands of orcs attacking Minas Tirith. It isn’t four guys and a girl in an abbey.

The dialogue I could forgive for not being archaic. English at that time was pretty unintelligible to us. The catch phrases, I couldn’t forgive. “Tonight, you’re buying!” was repeated way too much, and I was left gritting my teeth every time I heard it. I get it. These are Men Of Action. I can see they are kicking ass. Can’t they do it with less banter? Also, the smell joke was really lame. It’s a supernatural horror movie set in the dark ages. They wouldn’t be making modern observations about the smells that they lived with daily.

Spoilers!

There were elements that I liked. I did like the journey - where the young woman slowly became less and less human, even to those who defended her. It really brought up the tension and suspicion, and I loved how she messed with all of the characters’ heads, and played on their fears and morals. That part was fun.

I didn’t like the first prologue at all. It gave away the ending! The emotional impact of the demon being real was diminished because we already knew the girl was the demon. It also wasn’t in the crusaders’ perspective, which is what the majority of the tension of the movie was based on for most of the movie. Wouldn’t it have been so much better if it had been left out entirely?

I liked the second prologue. It really helped to show the perspective of the main characters, even if it had a lot of historical inaccuracy – but it’s Hollywood. What did I expect? Anyways, the two crusaders saw no evidence for the plague being of a demonic source, so they were skeptical of the monk’s claims. They’d been preached at a lot, but when they looked at the reality before them, they found that the two didn’t match. They felt betrayed and lied to by the church.

So we’re in an alternate universe where the Black Plague was caused by a demon, not bacteria in ticks and flees. That demon could be destroyed by an ancient spell read in Latin. The spell was in a holy spell book that the demon was hunting down all of the copies of and destroying them. And, for some reason, when the demon knew where it was, it couldn’t melt its cage and go there like it did at the end. Why did it hang around messing with their heads when it could escape so easily on its own? It escaped its cage towards the beginning of the story too – why didn’t it just fly there, destroy the book, and be done with it?

The ending. The ending was so bad it was comical. So, all of the monks have died of the plague. The demon possesses the corpses and makes them scuttle around like crabs in hilariously bad CGI. One of the characters even mentioned how silly they look, saying, “They’re like cockroaches.”

I realize that the point of the hole-filled plot was so there could be an excuse for a long journey where the demon messed with their heads. Still - couldn’t they have thought up something that made more sense? Here’s what I’d do.

I’d reduce the power of the demon. Much of the superstition about demons is that they have to be invited in. They are powerless until you give them power. So, at the beginning of the journey, she has very little power over them.

I’d cut the first escape and turn it into an escape attempt – with her not making it far and appearing to be much more human than she is. Perhaps not even making it out of her cage.

The crossing of the gulf is where I’d make the biggest change. When one of the wheels of the cart breaks through the bridge, they let her out, despite the monk’s protests. Then, amongst the eerie eaves of the forest, she makes her final attempt at claiming her freedom.

The climax would involve her pitting the travelers against each other. She betrays the crusaders, who believe that she’s just a girl, and uses the chance to escape.

Her goal is to escape, not a holy spell book.

I’d also make it so that her true form is never seen, so you never know exactly what kind of supernatural spirit, demon, or creature she is.

That she is destroyed is merely an accident. As the travelers start to battle, she is killed in the crossfire, despite her manipulations.

I’d also get rid of making the Black Plague the demon’s fault. That part was silly. The claim, however, that the monk makes I’d leave in. It makes him sound far less believable and trustable.

I’d also get rid of this “fair trial” nonsense. The concept didn’t really exist. They believed that God would give them signs of guilt of innocence, and all they had to do was divine the signs properly. So why are they sending her there? Perhaps there is a saint there that is known to break curses, someone with divinity that could cleanse the child. Her guilt as a witch was already decided – so perhaps they don’t think it’s a witch but a possession? If they’d have decided that she’s a witch, they’d have killed her already.

I don’t know why, but I really wanted this movie to be good. I heard that it did poorly and that the critics didn’t like it, but I wanted it to have been good. It feels like it could have been. Maybe with a different score, and a few more months working on the script so it wasn’t so holey and hokey.

To give it an arbitrary value, I’d say that it’s two out of five. Parts of it were entertaining, but the excuses for the entertaining parts were so badly flawed that they drowned them out.

Also, WTF is with the title? Seasons had nothing to do with the story at all!