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One of the most insufferable movies I've ever watched.

Anna Biller pilfers liberally from 70s films (most of which, by her own admission, she hasn't seen) to bring her gender essentialist, weak tea sexual politics to life. Meanwhile, she blatantly appropriates real spiritual beliefs for aesthetics while saying very toxic things about them. Her script's depiction of the craft is embarrassing, fascile, and full of inaccuracies. It's insulting, and full of Wicca 101 text dumps that feel pulled from Wikipedia.

And yes, it's all very beautiful to look at it, but who cares? It's hard to take 'death of the author' into consideration when the director is out in front, giving interviews about how the crew hated working on it, and hasn't even watched it. There isn't fondness or love or care put onto celluloid. It's the director's hyperfixations immortalized to the chagrin of others involved. There's a difference between passionate filmmaking and hyperfixative filmmaking. This is very much the latter.

Also, I cannot help but to sneer at Biller's pretensions of being a feminist filmmaker who doesn't do icky gross bad exploitation films. Okay, then. Why include a lovingly lighted, erotic, shimmering close-up of a woman pissing into a jar? Followed by a piss-centric plotline? It's a pretty transparent bit of watersports pandering, which belies some kind of fascination with it. I don't think it's a transgressive reclamation of feminine excrement - I don't think Biller has that level of complexity. It's spectacle. Piss spectacle.

Gynocentric with absolutely no pretense of actual female liberation or positive commentary on women's place in society. Instead, it ironically recreates many of the systems of oppression that it is seemingly preoccupied with. Kind of like Jennifer's Body, another "feminist" horror movie that is inspired and drawn from movies that are really much better.

I understand why people who haven't seen much of what The Love Witch is inspired by would like it. I'm confounded that anyone who has would.