By Terry Sherwood
This film is like a good curry: the first taste seems almost gentle, then comes the tang, then the heat, and finally you realize the flavour has worked its way into everything. Beginning with the opening music and the visuals of a rural village not in the Hollywood style Director Minos Papas’s Motherwitch firmly transports you into its world. This is folk horror made with remarkable confidence often brilliant at times, and, for me, operating on the same rarefied level as Robert Eggers’s underrated picture “The Witch” and the superb rural Italian film Il Demonio.
Set in Cyprus in 1882, Motherwitch follows Eleni (Margarita Zachariou), an artist and mother whose life is destroyed by the deaths of her children. Superbly stagged in the ruins of a building with creeping musical tones and crumbling destruction that ends in the sound of debris and dust. Grief drives her toward an act of creation that is also an act of desperation: she attempts to bring them back, inadvertently unleashing the Kalikantzari, demonic creatures drawn from Greek folklore. The work is less interested in presenting us with a conventional monster movie than in asking what happens when grief turns creation into destruction.
That distinction is important. Motherwitch understands something the best folk horror understands: the supernatural is most effective when it seems to grow naturally out of the landscape, beliefs and emotional lives of the characters.
That is where the comparison with The Witch becomes useful. Like Eggers, Papas has confidence in stillness. He allows the period setting, landscape, faces, rooms and silences to do some of the storytelling. Neither film needs a monster jumping into the frame every few minutes to remind us that we’re watching horror. Evil seems already present, somewhere between religion, folklore, family and the natural world.
Jack McDonald’s cinematography is essential to this effect. Motherwitch frequently looks less photographed than painted. There is texture everywhere: earth, fabric, skin, candlelight and darkness. Considering Eleni herself is a painter, this visual richness becomes more than decorative. Art is woven into the film’s argument.
Creation, in Mother witch, requires courage. Destruction is comparatively easy which is quoted within the film.
This becomes especially moving through Eleni’s relationship with Mikalakis (Sifis Katsoulakis), a talented young boy suffering under abusive parents. The grieving mother and unwanted child recognize something in each other. Their shared interest in painting initially seems like a small refuge from the darkness surrounding them, but gradually it becomes the emotional centre of the film. If Eleni cannot undo death, perhaps she can still nurture life.
Zachariou is superb. She refuses to make Eleni’s grief conventionally sympathetic at every moment especially her notes when she sings of events . There is anger in her, exhaustion, selfishness and eventually an almost frightening indifference to consequences. She seems at times to wear grief physically, as though carrying a weight that has altered the way she moves through the world.
Yet Katsoulakis performance is remarkably assured for such a young actor because he doesn’t play Mikalakis simply as an innocent child waiting to be rescued. There is intelligence and watchfulness in him. Together, the two actors give Motherwitch something that many atmospheric horror films lack: genuine emotional warmth.
The British colonial presence is historically significant and thematically understandable as colonialism and brutality becomes another force capable of destroying culture, identity and things others have created. Likewise, a few of the more explicit supernatural moments are less powerful than the quieter suggestions of evil. Papas is strongest when he trusts us to look into the darkness rather than showing us exactly what is standing there especially on a long tracking shot and zoom of a room that slowly reveals something,
“Motherwitch” should not be judged by the first twenty minutes alone. Its rhythm is part of its method. Like a carefully prepared dish, it needs time for the flavours to emerge. The grief comes first, folklore follows, dread begins accumulating, and only gradually do we understand how carefully Papas has connected motherhood, artistic creation and supernatural horror.
There are fascinating echoes of Brunello Rondi’s superb 1963 rural Italian film Il Demonio in Motherwitch. Both films place a suffering woman within an isolated rural community where religion, folklore and superstition remain part of everyday life. In Il Demonio, Purif’s anguish is interpreted by the villagers through the language of possession and witchcraft. In Motherwitch, Eleni’s devastating loss of her children similarly opens a door between personal grief and the supernatural. Both women experience the loss of children or motherhood, turning something intensely private into something the surrounding community fears. Motherwitch, like the superb Il Demonio, makes us wonder whether the real demon is supernatural at all, or something created by grief, isolation and the community surrounding these women.
By the end, *Motherwitch* has become something much richer than a story about a woman accidentally summoning demon. It is about what we create after something has been taken from us.
Bloody Flicks 