By Tristan Bishop
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s retitle time again! This one originally went by the name Another – in fact it played at Frightfest 2014 until that very title – but now it has resurfaced under the far more exploitable title of Mark Of The Witch (not to be confused with the 1970 witchcraft cheapie of the same name). Frankly it’s pretty good timing too, with Robert Eggers’ impressive The Witch due for release this year. But, under any title, is Mark Of The Witch about to put you under its spell? (Sorry.)
In an effectively eerie opening, we see a group of group of black-robed Satanists performing some kind of ritual with a baby in a cave. Flash forward 18 years and we’re introduced to Jordyn (Paulie Rojas), who is celebrating her 18th birthday with a few friends and her rather intense Aunt Ruth. Rather than the traditional cake and Twister (or whatever it is that young people get up to these days), Ruth decides to tell Jordyn she’s the spitting image of her dead mother at her age, which is the age that she died. Ruth tops this off by attempting to disembowel herself at the dinner table. Happy birthday! Of course, this isn’t the end of things, and soon Jordyn begins to be plagued by horrifying visions and mysterious occurrences. Could her mother have been a witch? And is Jordyn herself cursed to follow in her mother’s footsteps?
If that synopsis seems a little vague, there’s a good reason for this – chiefly that Mark Of The Witch is a very difficult film to follow. Not because it has a labyrinthine plot, or contains complex and challenging ideas, it’s just that the way it has been filmed is just so damned… distracting. Every shot is filtered to within an inch of its life to achieve a ‘retro’ effect (which ends up looking less retro and more a cheap modern film which has been filtered to within an inch of its life to achieve… well, you get the idea). Slow motion is splurged all over the shop for no discernible reason other than to stretch a slim plot out to 80 minutes, and the whole thing comes off more as demonstration of the director’s technical tricks than as an actual film worth viewing.
Advance publicity and the very small number of online reviews all seem to refer to this film as a ‘neo-giallo’ and as ‘Argento-influenced’ but I think that’s pretty wide of the mark, unless they’re referring to late-period Dario’s lack of skill with scripts and actors. Actually, that’s somewhat unfair of me – Mother Of Tears, Argento’s own 2007 witch story, is way more entertaining than this mess, by dint of including a huge dollop of gore amongst the silliness. We could have done with a bit more of that here – there IS some blood, but amongst the filters and hyperactive editing (and, oh, did I mention the cringe-inducing CGI?), it’s nearly impossible to work out where it came from. There’s a pretty disturbing scene early on where Jordyn wakes up having slept with a filthy old janitor at her work (but having no memory of the act), but in the context of the rest of the film it just comes off as a bit distasteful – although that’s not usually something that puts us horror fans off, to be fair.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for a little style-over-substance, but, without wanting to get all Marshall-McLuhan-media-theorist about it, the style needs to say something; witness the films of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer & Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears), which take the visual tropes of the giallo and stretch them into near abstract forms as an exploration of sex, death and consciousness. Mark Of The Witch, however, just ends up coming across as artless, boring and a complete waste of time.
Mark of the Witch is out on UK DVD on 15th February, from Metrodome.