31 Days of Halloween: The Appearance

2018, Kurt Knight (We All Fall Down) -- download

Click click click. One from the downloads. It was on The Lists for that year, oft a deciding factor in what we watch, once we work through the well known ones, and the interesting looking ones on the streaming services. Note about "interesting looking" given not every movie on a streaming service provides a trailer -- we are talking box covers, blurbs, a few names and placement. Good art work always gets me but the right blurb can be make or break on an unknown.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.

A monastery in the Middle Ages, we don't get told exactly where or when, but the old'n times. A monk has been murdered! Looks like suicide, but, "its a witch!" Despite the Abbot's denials, a scribe sends for the Inquisition to prove whether the girl in their dungeons is a witch, or not, before the townsfolk demand her be burned at the stake. OK, weird pivot. Usually the Inquisition is the "bad guy" who the chaste monk or knight has to argue against, with their fervour to burn every wayward woman on a pyre.

So a lone inquisitor and his companion knight Johnny (?!? Kristian Nairn, Game of Thrones) head out on foot, the inquisitor having nightmares, or are they memories of having been raised in the monastery? I liked the opening journey, two inordinately clean looking adventurers on the road, Johnny the good knight faithful to god, and Mateho (Jake Stormoen, Mythica: A Quest for Heroes) whom Johnny frowns at for his lack of faith. But as soon as they arrive, I started noticing the cracks in the (low) budget. Yoinks, the village set outside the monastery walls looked like it was built from the machine cut scraps from the local building supplies. At least muddy it up Mr and Mrs Set Decorator!

Anywayz.

There is a standard plot format to "burn the witch!" movies, especially those set during the Inquisition and/or Crusader time periods. It usually involves someone who whole heartedly believes the old woman / young woman is a witch, and the other person who is not quite sure, and needs to see, well you know, actual proof before lighting the bonfire. Usually the asking-for-proof person is seen as naïve and almost consistently, the UnSub(stantiated) Witch messes with the mind of the person who believes in their proof. There is either seduction involved, or at least puppy dog eyes. Here, Mateho already believes she is innocent, even though it is his job to figger it out. Its kind of weird, but we are given a weakened idea that he may an enlightened man of logic & science trapped within the haze of religious fervour & superstition. But you would think he would at least entertain the idea considering the age he is living in. And especially once more monks start dying under weird circumstances, and he begins seeing things. But nope, not a witch, so let's remove the icons of protection that keep her powerless within her cage. OK, I get the idea of maybe not torturing the young woman without confirming she is a witch, but the bangles hanging on her cage do nothing against her; they are just unfortunate decorations. UNLESS SHE IS A WITCH ! If the bangles bother her, she .... well, she might BE A WITCH !

Eventually, Mateho is forced to actually do Inquisitiony Witch Testing things, like dunking her in a barrel which has a metal clasp in the shape of a cross. If she is willing to raise her head and view the image, she will breathe, and therefore not be a witch. No witch can look on the cross. So, when supposedly not-witch young girl refuses to look upon said cross/clasp and drowns instead, maybe, just maybe SHE WAS A WITCH ? Nope, Mateho gets all grumpy that they did this to the young definitely not a witch woman. So, witch girl is now dead, but guess what, monks keep dying. And now they have to blame Mateho, who is in thrall to the dead-witch.

She gets up, proving once and for all, that is really, truly a witch. We see it, he sees it, he regrets not considering she might be a witch, and she kills Johnny to spite him. The movie then does go down a somewhat interesting path reminding us that the monks had something rather heinous to hide, beyond the fact that the girl might be a witch, but it still struck me as odd that Mateho was still somewhat focused on finding justice for witch girl, who killed Johnny, and might have killed a bunch of other monks. Yes, the raping of the young witch girl was a horrible act, but after determining the girl was indeed In League With the Devil, might he have been more interested in defeating her, than revealing the horrible acts of the monks? I am sure a better told movie would have focused more on the revelation that a woman of power, whether Christian power or not, being anathema to Christian leaders of the time. A better movie would have made her witchy acts more ambiguous, less monstrous, less Pact with the Devil therefore allying us with her actions. But instead, I was more, "dude, banish the evil witch FIRST, then punish the evil humans."

Alas...

Ed. Note: Marmy points out a very salient point which kind of does change the makeup of my opinion. Mostly. The witch was In League With the Devil because the abbot sent her to him. The abbot had been raping her, filling her with all the worldly sins of the other monks, and that had happened when Mateho was a boy. Now, all these years later, she has returned, to take vengeance on her aggressors. 

For a movie fraught with terrible set dressing and only middling costuming, and the clusterfuck of a plot, the other acts of film making were not that bad. While I was constantly dragged out of the moment by the "castle" scenes that looked more like someone's Halloween maze set, the lighting and sound was grand and the acting was more than passable. This is one of those times when they should have benefited from incredibly bad lighting.