Mark of the Witch (2014)
'"Your dirty, dark soul attempting to pull you back inside to devour you"
Mark of the Witch is a modern day take on witchcraft with giallo influences. If you strip everything away, the film is a simple coming of age tale about a young woman, Jordyn, who is the devil's daughter.
I don't think there's a single scene in this film that you could say was shot in a normal, conventional fashion. This is about as far from the Hollywood school of film making as you can probably get. Lavishly shot, it plays as though the fabric of reality is cracking and a hypnotic evil is seeping through involving both the film and our senses, firmly placing the viewer in Jordyn's hallucinatory existence. It practically feels impossible to review this in the normal sense due to it being an ethereal mind **** that stimulates and provokes the darkest reaches of our imagination, taking the viewer deeper into what feels like a waking nightmare and all this to a delightful classical score from the likes of Beethoven and Chopin.
Mark of the Witch clearly isn't a film for everyone. It's dark, demented, surreal and wildly ambitious, definitely a case of style over substance, almost to the point where it will put people off. However there's so much to take in it demands a second viewing. The thanks list at the end gives gratitude to both Jess Franco and Dario Argento and you can tell it's inspired by the lucid nightmares of these two classic exponents of horror. Argento's Suspiria and Inferno especially.
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