Critics reviews

It's exhilarating and inspiring when a work of art comes along that defies all categories and upends expectations. That's The Love Witch, an entrancing, emotional, intelligent and challenging picture that's much more than the retro rumination some have pegged it as. The suggestion that it feels like the work of "the great granddaughter of Russ Meyer"... is too easy to slap on this picture. There's a deeper, darker undercurrent lacing every moment, and it's uniquely its own creature.

Anna Biller wrote, directed, production designed, costume designed, composed. She is a breathtaking visionary: she knows what she wants, she sees it in her head, she does what needs to be done to make her vision a reality. She works very closely with her actors: everyone is so on the same page that the performances, too, emanate the sensibility of the director. Samantha Robinson, as the "love witch", gives one of the performances of the year.

In a masc4masc world, few "specialty" filmmakers wear a Cheshire grin as cunningly as Anna Biller, who knows exactly the distance between "Burn the witch!" and "Lock her up!" Her debut feature, Viva, was a retro aperitif; The Love Witch is a subversive seven-course manifesto with a '70s Dinner Party menu.

It may seem Biller is mounting an assault on delightfully garish exploitation fare, ones with overemphatic titles like "Vixen!", "Score" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!" But that's not quite what she's doing. She clearly loves these films; she wants to work with them, not take them down, using their language to get at something new and fun.

This film, then, exists not in the past but in a world that looks exactly the way its multi-hyphenate auteur wants it to look. It's refreshing to watch a film that commits so boldly to a specific aesthetic, and even more so when that aesthetic is hyperfeminine.

Biller's brilliance here is that witchcraft, front and centre as the subject matter, is of course an allegorical tool. It's cinema that Elaine/Biller controls without authorization, that empowers her. And perhaps more radical still, they do this not by adopting the outward trappings of masculine power, but by fully embodying the performative place of the femme... Biller is a preternaturally gifted filmmaker whose unique formal approach is thoroughly in service to an intellectual worldview.

Biller evinces her understanding of every element in a 1950s or '60s-era Technicolor production as either implicitly or explicitly pertaining to sex. The forceful fullness of Technicolor merges with the repressive cultural values of its era to forge an aesthetic that's simultaneously forward and demure, yielding a head-spinning subtextual neurosis that most modern filmmaking can't hope to recapture, with its uninhibited and taken-for-granted access to the profane.

The redolence of schlockiness Biller attaches to "The Love Witch" seems like an organic factor in her actual way of seeing. The movie is relentless in how it poses questions about our culture's way of dealing with the power of female sexuality (and it wouldn't work without Robinson, whose appearance and performance is impeccable for the job) and acknowledges that there's not only unease in these questions and their answers but also mordant hilarity.

The movie is less a matter of story than of style—it's filled with ornate period costumes and furnishings (which were handmade by Biller) as well as sumptuous swaths of color and old-school optical effects. Biller's feminist philosophy meshes with the freewheeling delight of her aestheticism. The film pulsates with furious creative energy, sparking excitement and amazement by way of its decorative twists, intellectual provocations, and astounding humor.

Presided over by the angry spirit of Helen Gurley Brown, Anna Biller's The Love Witch is a sprawling, beguiling world unto itself. Biller's sharp film stands in stark contrast to the complacency and crushing safeness of the vast majority of independent films made in the U.S., and is far more than the lighthearted genre pastiche or retrophile curiosity it may seem to be at first glance.

A cinephilic homage to the sexploitation films of the 1970s, Biller's sensual and symbol-laden sophomore film goes beyond pastiche to outright subvert the gender politics within the genre, presenting a stunning portrait of female power and madness.

A very dry, stylized, totally obsessive horror comedy that, in its tale of an amorous witch playing the field in Eureka, California, is both a New Age satire and a credible pastiche of an American International drive-in flick, circa 1970.