Season of The Love Witch

In which the Love Witch casts her sex and love magic on us, and we love every minute of it.

Halloween is fast approaching and thank Samhain for that. This most wonderfully witchy time of year means we’re bringing back the “Season of the Witch” series, and this time out we’re focusing on Elaine Curtis, a supremely seductive practitioner of sex magic and love magic. Elaine is the titular character in Anna Biller’s sumptuously stylish The Love Witch (2016), and to say she’s complicated would be an understatement.

When we first meet Elaine she’s fleeing a troubling past in San Francisco for small town life in the Redwoods of California. After settling into an opulent, gothic house, making friends with a slightly repressed married woman, Elaine soon begins attracting the attention of the local male population, thanks to her expertise with sex magic. Hilarity ensues and the bodies begin piling up.

The Love Witch appears to be set in modern times, but aesthetically and cinematically Biller draws heavily upon the 1960s and 1970s. Elaine seems to have stepped right out of 1969, with her groovy fashion and mesmerizing blue eye shadow. She’s always wearing silk stockings and garter belts under her colorfully patterned minidresses. She’s a resplendent vision, and even without her use of magic, many a man (and woman) would feel compelled to do her bidding.

One memorable—and disturbing—scene finds Elaine writhing erotically on the bed, wearing nothing but a sexy white bra and panties, and a wide-open sheer negligee. Moaning in apparent ecstasy, she sensually caresses her body, while flashing back to her past. We see she’s remembering her time in a coven, in which she is stripped and bound in an initiation ritual that appears to cause her great discomfort. As she recalls this trauma, she continues to stroke herself and moan in delirious ecstasy. The juxtaposition of apparent abuse and intense arousal is jarring. Robinson’s sheer sex appeal is on full display in this scene. It’s like Biller is daring us to be titillated by Elaine’s sensuality even in the face of her past trauma.

In a way, that scene is the most representative of what appears to be The Love Witch‘s central theme, in which our objectification of Elaine makes the male characters—and us—simultaneously aroused and uncomfortable. That tension is what makes it such an engrossing watch. At times Elaine’s motivations are conflicting, or seemingly random, but can also be read as the actions of a confused woman who’s been used and abused in the past. Elaine being a victim of past abuses does not excuse her use of magic and hallucinogens to bend men’s wills however she pleases. Elaine is troubled, and the entire film leads up to the concrete evidence at the end that she’s finally tipped over the edge into deadly femme fatale territory.

So, yes, Elaine is complex. She’s also quite possibly an unreliable narrator. She’s sexy and dangerous, a lethal combination. She wields her sex magic to attain love magic, and really, who doesn’t want to be loved?