A confident feature debut from director Pierre Tsigaridis, benefiting from an interesting script by actress Kristina Klebe and first-timer Maxime Ransom, Two Witches is a real melting pot of everyday worries and supernatural scares. It is also two seemingly separate story strands that end up connecting and intertwining on the way to a final act that should please anyone who is a fan of, well, I won’t namecheck anything that should spoil the fun of the ending.
We start off by meeting Sarah (Belle Adams) and her partner, Simon (Ian Michaels). Sarah is pregnant, the couple are out enjoying a meal, and it quickly becomes clear that Simon is a bit inconsiderate. It also quickly becomes clear that Sarah is being stared at by an elderly woman in the restaurant. Does the woman have a problem with her, or is there something another reason for her staring so much? Sarah and Simon then go to visit their friends, Melissa (Dina Silva) and Dustin (Tim Fox), and the night goes from bad to worse. It’s then time to meet Rachel (Klebe) and her housemate, Masha (Rebekah Kennedy). Those two seem to get on alright, until Masha starts taking personal stories relayed to her by Rachel and passing them off as her on. And Masha suspects she is about to change, possibly inheriting the power of her witchy grandmother when granny passes away.
I wasn’t fully into Two Witches as the first main section played out. The nightmarish atmosphere, snapshots of random blood and viscera, and general confusion about what was really going on left me a bit removed from the events I was watching. Not that I hated it. I just didn’t invest in things while I wasn’t entirely sure of what was going on, or whether or not the people most affected were supposed to be deserving of their ordeal. The very end of that main segment clears things up a bit though, and the second part of the film has no such ambiguity, which helps make everything more entertaining, and it feels more fresh than a film that could have played coy for every minute of the runtime. Ambiguity isn’t a particularly bad thing, and horror movies have often kept viewers on their toes as they bleed in and out of reality and unreality, but Two Witches really steps up a gear when everything is overt and obvious, letting viewers sit and wait for other characters to catch on to the horror of their situation.
The film also steps up a gear as soon as Kennedy appears onscreen. She is the absolute highlight, giving a performance that is as gleeful as it is twisted and dangerous. Klebe works well alongside her, but she is left with the thankless task of being the rational person who just wants to continue having a peaceful and normal life. Silva and Fox are good, both bringing a bit more energy to their roles than Adams and Michaels, and their journey takes them slowly and believably from being fairly open-minded to starting to fear for their lives.
Tsigaridis also worked on the script with Klebe and Rancon, and the three do an excellent job. Despite my own reservations about the first part of the film, I am already looking forward to rewatching this. It’s smartly constructed, the visual style throughout is often gorgeous, and the score from Gioacchino Marincola is a perfect accompaniment to the modern gothic vibe of the whole thing.
I almost enjoyed this enough to attempt writing this review as a reworked version of the song “Two Princes”, by Spin Doctors. Then I realised that I actually enjoyed it enough to NOT do that. But the temptation was always there.
8/10
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