Okay, let's start with the positive here: without question, The Love Witch is an absolute feast for the eyes. Anna Biller clearly knows her stuff when it comes to '60s horror and Technicolor filmmaking, and her dedication to recreating that style is both admirable and impressive. I'm accustomed to British movies looking this way, so the American accents kinda threw me, and four or five of the wide shots don't quite convince, but, otherwise, you could probably fool someone into thinking this thing was made over fifty years ago. It's that authentic.
And yet, that's basically where my praise ends. Nothing else about the movie worked for me, frankly. The deliberately hokey writing and acting, while initially kind of amusing, started getting on my nerves after a while, the pacing was far too slow for me to ever get fully invested, and the horror elements were so tame and infrequent that I'm not totally sure this should count as an entry in the genre. Even the satirical elements, which do make some amusing points about gender roles, are largely too subtle and esoteric to fully land (though I freely admit to being a bit of a moron when it comes to this kind of commentary, so that one's almost certainly on me).
I can understand why the movie's received universal acclaim, but I'd also be lying if I said that I wasn't bored for the majority of the runtime.
Grade: C
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