'The Witches': Anne Hathaway Casts An Exasperating Spell In Robert Zemeckis' Dull Film [Review]

There are children’s movies, and then there are movies that are straight-up childish. Robert Zemeckis’ “The Witches,” the second adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel of the same name arriving 30 years after Nicolas Roeg directed his own, falls squarely under the latter designation. Instead of a movie for children, Zemeckis’ film panders to children and goes so far overboard that it winds up pandering at them. Kids deserve good movies. They deserve good horror movies, too, especially as the world grows bleaker by the day and necessitates tools for giving the bleakness context. Horror can’t send the darkness away but can at least make it go down more easily; nothing’s scarier than not understanding why there’s darkness in the first place.

Being a child in 2020 is hard. The planet’s looking shabby under the strain of climate change, and America specifically has spent four years buckling under the weight of the gibbering howler monkey-in-chief. “The Witches” doesn’t care about that or about the withering Earth. Instead, the film focuses on broader observations about youth and growing up, and the painful journey all kids take from childhood to adulthood, which for young Charlie Hansen (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno) starts sooner than seems fair. Charlie is orphaned after a car accident snatches his mother and father from him, and so he moves in with his grandmother, Agatha (Octavia Spencer), the archetypal tough lovin’ type. She doesn’t let Charlie wallow in his grief, and instead plies him with wisdom, kindness, dance parties, chicken thighs, and cornbread.

Agatha’s great. She’s a real character, a commodity sorely lacking throughout the rest of “The Witches” as the plot kicks in. Charlie stumbles on a witch at the market, Agatha develops a sudden cold, not from COVID but a witch’s curse, and they hightail it to a fancy-pants hotel where they take shelter from the surreptitious evil crone; seems that Agatha had a run-in with a witch as a girl that left her best friend forever changed into a chicken, and she’s not exactly eager to expose her grandson to a similar fate. But they pick the wrong hotel and find themselves sharing the floor with the whole coven, led by the Grand High Witch, Lilith (Anne Hathaway). Should’ve stayed at a Marriott.

Bruno’s aw-shucks guilelessness and confidence join with Spencer’s well-practiced hard-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside act for memorable sweetness. Theirs is a good storytelling foundation for a spooky horror tale: Agatha brings Charlie just to the cusp of acceptance before cruel fate brings down the clawed fist of the coven and shatters that slowly-won reconciliation between grandma and grandson in the blink of an eye. But the trouble with “The Witches” is who that clawed fist belongs to, and how wildly she overacts, as if Hathaway decided to outdo her work in “Alice in Wonderland” as the White Queen. Hathaway gives Lilith an accent worthy of Boris Badenov, sans cultural authenticity, and a bratty, pouting temperament that reads less as menacing and more as spoiled.

She’s a wretched, annoying thing augmented in her appearance by wretched, annoying digital FX: Think Pennywise from “It” but rushed and uninspired, as if there’s no way to evolve her Glasgow smile splitting into a yawning toothy maw. The maw alone is expected to suffice. But Lilith isn’t especially scary, in part because the effects don’t go the distance and, in part, because Hathaway has no ceiling for making an overwrought caricature of pure evil. Her work lets the rest of the cast down; try as they might to react with performed fear to Lilith’s visage, they only appear mildly bewildered, like they’re unsure how to interact with Hathaway’s vaguely Eastern European elocution or her distinctly hambone histrionics. Bruno isn’t helped in this regard by mousehood, being forced to voice a CGI mouse for most of the film once he’s turned into a rodent in keeping with the Dahl book.

And again, the effects are dodgy. Mouse-Charlie and his two mouse pals—Daisy (Kristen Chenoweth) and Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick)—blend poorly with physical environments. Spencer hustles overtime making convincing dialogue with animated mice, a task made more difficult by Zemeckis’ shallow writing for Daisy and Bruno. Her main characteristic is that she’s a no-guff Southern gal—in other words, a Kristen Chenoweth character—and his defining quality is that he’s chubby and always hungry, so hungry in fact that his hunger gets the gang into trouble on more than one occasion. At one point Bruno nearly loses his life over pieces of cheese; cue audience laughter at the fatty. The jokes write themselves and Zemeckis should’ve known well enough to write them out, though given that his name’s on the script next to Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris, maybe sole blame isn’t his. Someone, at some point, probably should’ve tossed the low-hanging fruit.

Compare Zemeckis’ film to the Roeg picture, which plays out more or less the same way until the ending; Dahl famously had a conniption over Roeg’s sunnier resolution, and were he alive today, he might praise Zemeckis for sticking closer to his pages. What sets them apart falls to both the effects and the villain. Hathaway is no Anjelica Huston, though so few of us are, and computer effects are a sloppy replacement for any kind of practical effects, particularly puppets and prosthetics provided by the late Jim Henson’s workshop. The 1990 “The Witches” had imagination and invention driving it forward. Zemeckis’ treatment has the glaring absence of both with a surplus of juvenile humor.

Maybe stacking Roeg’s version against Zemeckis’ is unfair. Maybe Zemeckis, once an effects pioneer and now an awkward great past his prime, should’ve left it alone instead of following up on perfection. “The Witches” serves its niche poorly, treating its core audience as naive and never considering for a moment that kids are more perceptive than grown-ups give them credit for. The writing misunderstands “childlike” as cheap and immature, and the rest of the movie follows that misunderstanding. [D]

“The Witches” arrives on HBO Max on October 22.