The Witches (2020)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Chris Rock

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Oddly enough, had 2020 turned out like some kind of normal year, I probably would not have felt much of an impetus to watch it, but as I apparently have already paid for the movie with my HBO subscription, then I might as well take the plunge.

Did I Like It: So let us begin with the headline. The new remake of The Witches is not the earworm the original adaptation of the film became. It will likely be forgotten pretty quickly as everyone associated with the film has done better work before and will likely to better work in the future.

And that’s not the worst thing in the world.

I actually applaud the film for not trying to re-create the “girl trapped in a painting” scene featured in both the book and the original film. It’s the most memorable part of that previous movie, and any attempt to recreate it is a fool’s errand. When the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children displays a tableau with child statues in the hotel, I did wonder if there were actual kids trapped in those figures, though.

Changing the setting to the American south of the 1960s is a dollop of inspiration, adding a layer of more banal—and unsettlingly real—evil to the proceedings. It would have been nice for that subtext to have been brought to the surface just a bit more, but keeping the setting in England and Norway would have been simply more of the same.

This new film also tries to correct for past mistakes, by (spoiler alert) keeping the hero (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno as a child and new mouse, Chris Rock as his older self) a mouse at the end of the story. Sadly, this film can’t quite pull the trigger on the bittersweet quality of Roald Dahl’s work. In the book, it’s clear our hero will only live for a few more years, to say nothing of the realization that poor Bruno Jenkins (Codie-Lei Eastick) was probably killed by his mousephobic parents. Here, it looks like our hero may live far longer than any other mouse, and Bruno gets to join him and Grandma (Spencer) in their witch-hunting adventures. Perhaps the truly downer endings in children’s literature will never find their way out of the pages of books. Only the bookish kids can be trusted with the reality that sometimes bad things happen.

The rest of the movie is, unfortunately, a litany of disappointments. 

I’m as certain as I can be without a confession to this effect, but it sounded not only like Alan Silvestri phones his score in, but that the entirety of his orchestrations were culled from deleted tracks he wrote for any number of Avengers movies.

It’s always nice to see—or at least hear—Kristen Chenoweth in a film. And yet, her role as another human transformed into a mouse before the events of the film feels too forced in before it turns out she isn’t going to be given anything to do. A girl-mouse is a fine enough idea—why not make the hero female? Only boys can plaintively wail “Grandma!” and do the legwork of getting the mouse-maker formula into the witches’ soup?

Ma (2019)

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans

Have I Seen it Before: Maybe I have, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t squirming in my seat the whole time.

Did I Like It: I like it the moments after I saw it. I might have really liked it had I possessed absolutely no concept of what the film would be about going in. It may split from my mind the more time passes.

That is to say that there is no problem with the suspense quotient of Ma. It’s forty miles of bad road, and the only qualm that I would have with the film is that it ends up in a fairly predictable place. It forges together elements from Psycho (1960), Carrie (1976), and Misery (1990), just to name a few, it all ends somewhere in the vicinity of the territory in which those movies did.

There was potential for this to go into some truly dark places, and some of those places might have made Sue Ann (Spencer) a more thoroughly sympathetic villain. The borderline-incestuous connections between the people in that small town could have taken some terrible turns, and everyone could have been a little bit damned at the end of the proceedings. Instead, the worst character are punished in appropriate, if morbid, ways.

That’s a minor complaint, though. A horror movie need not have sympathy for its villain to be successful within the context of its genre, and Ma succeeds in so many places where other genre pictures fail. The teenagers all believably behave and interact with one another. If I had a dime for every horror movie that missed the mark in that regard, I’d be richer than Jason Blum at this point. And, despite how the sum of the film’s parts might underwhelm, God help me if I didn’t squirm through every moment of the road to get there. That’s a testament to Octavia Spencer’s commitment to a role that other Oscar winners might have blanched at. One imagines that this film might not make the waves to typecast her, and if she keeps swinging for the fences like this, there may be some other little gold men in her future.