Mark of the Witch, 2014.
Directed by Jason Bognacki.
Starring David Landry, Maria Olsen, Lillian Pennypacker, Paulie Rojas and Nancy Wolfe.
SYNOPSIS:
A young woman turns 18 and discovers that she may be the spawn of Satan. Happy birthday…
As Mark of the Witch (a.k.a. Another) opens we see masked figures dressed in black robes delivering a baby inside a CGI cave set inside a cliff on a CGI landscape, along which a CGI crow flies from a CGI tree – not looking good so far. We then fast forward 18 years and Jordyn (Paulie Rojas), the baby we saw at the beginning, is celebrating her birthday, although her creepy aunt Ruth (Nancy Wolfe) is hardly being the life and soul by spouting cryptic gobbledygook.
However, the party livens up a bit when Ruth takes a rather large kitchen knife and stabs herself in the stomach whilst shouting “It is time!” After Ruth is hospitalised, Jordyn begins to have weird visions involving dirty old men, her best friend and an evil presence with bad dental hygiene. It turns out that Jordyn has family connections with Satan and it’s up to former nun Ruth to try and protect her niece from her true lineage.
Or something like that. Mark of the Witch is a film full of symbolism that wears its influences on its sleeve (The Omen, The Exorcist and Suspiria are all heavily referenced in one way or another) but doesn’t really have a lot to say other than “If we play things out slowly it looks more arty and meaningful”. Films like The Omen and The Exorcist draw you in from the start and subtly fill you with unease before they go for the big shocks but in Mark of the Witch the overly stylised visuals smother everything and story is put aside in favour of atmosphere which, you could argue, most of the classic giallo movies that this film would dearly love to be mentioned in the same breath as do. However, no matter how much emphasis is put on stimulating the eyes, the patchy and random nature of telling the paper-thin plot through individual scenes rather than a flowing narrative is jarring and feels somewhat lazy, as if the filmmakers didn’t have enough material to fill in the gaps between set pieces so making it all hazy and disjointed will paper over the cracks.
Mark of the Witch is a long and painful 76 minutes that, had it played out at normal speed with a little less padding, it could have made for a fun short or episode of a horror anthology. As it is, it’s slow, unnecessarily weird and cheap looking, with the wide-eyed central performance from Paulie Rojas the only thing worth sitting through it for. All credit to writer/director Jason Bognacki for trying to do something different to the watered-down childish nonsense that makes up most of mainstream horror at the moment but mimicking Dario Argento when you clearly don’t have the resources or enough of a finished film to do it properly means you’re left with an off-kilter horror movie that mainstream audiences won’t get and those in the know won’t care for.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Chris Ward
https://youtu.be/XUGnM460Waw?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published February 15, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
