That being said, unlike a lot of similar films, I appreciated that there’s some value in The Witch for repeat viewers. There’s definitely an above-average 90-minute movie in here, but at two hours it feels excessive and large swaths could be cut to make a tighter production. It meanders for too long in the middle of the film, and seems to end just as it starts to get going again. Perhaps this is a product of having a Part 1 in the title, but I was left pretty unsatisfied with The Witch. There’s lots of easy beats here that I’m certain will be crowd-pleasers, though I have to wonder if Ja-Yoon and her fellow enhanced pals’ abilities could be used to better effect. This is ultimately the kind of raucous midnight movie fare that’s best experienced with an equally-raucous audience, as I’m sure Fantasia will provide, so maybe it’s okay that it’s mostly predictable. The titular ‘ Subversion’ keeps The Witch from being completely derivative of these other properties, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s breaking much new ground. The Witch counts among its influences Netflix’s Stranger Things (Ja-Yoon is such an Eleven), Stephen King’s Firestarter, James Cameron’s short-lived series Dark Angel, every X-Men story you’ve ever read or seen, and it even borrows its main conceit from the Bradley Cooper film, Limitless. All this is to set up a literally explosive third act where all three factions (and at least one or two superfluous others) meet up in a big hallway to fuck each other up. The idol competition has tipped off the organization running the experiments on the children, who are looking to bring Ja-Yoon back into the fold, as well as Gong Ja’s team of not- X-Men ‘enhanced’ teens who have their own motives. It’s soon established that this young man was also in the facility where Ja-Yoon grew up, and is a total psycho, brutally killing a dude for bumping into him and effortlessly throwing the body off the train. Ja-Yoon makes it to the finals, but on the train to the studio, she and Myung-hee meet a mysterious young man, Gong Ja (Choi Woo-sik), who seems to know her. Needing money for both, and with the support of her best pal and self-appointed manager Myung-hee (Ko Min-shi), Ja-Yoon enters an American Idol kind of talent show, wowing the judges with both her singing and a “magic act” involving telekinesis. Cutting to ten years later, and the now 18-year-old Ja-Yoon helps her father with his struggling farm and her mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s. The child, Ja-Yoon (Da-mi), is found unconscious and taken in by an elderly couple, and it’s established that she may never regain her memory. They eventually abandon their pursuit and decide to report back to their HQ that the child has been “decommissioned”. A child escapes from this facility, pursued by the facility’s head honcho (Jo Min-soo) and her henchman. Cutting to the present day, we’re introduced to an equally-gruesome hospital for children, where every surface is caked in blood. The Witch opens on gruesome footage from the Holocaust that depicts child prisons – hard to watch at any time, but especially in today’s political climate – and experiments being done on those children. Tasked with having to change, often on a dime, from a naive, giddy, earnest schoolgirl and bashful pop idol to a merciless killing machine, Da-mi navigates this challenge with the ease of a much more experienced actor. I’m amazed that this first-time performer is able to carry off such a complex and likeable character, and she’s absolutely the highlight of The Witch. What The Witch does have over I Saw The Devil, is a whole lot more character building, centered around an extremely strong debut performance from its lead, Kim Da-mi. It’s also a much lighter story, owing a lot to a more restrained, dare I say jaunty, first half. Don’t get it twisted this is still a pretty violent film, especially in the second half, but it’s not really at the same level of I Saw The Devil, which is one of the most violent films I’ve ever seen. The violence in The Witch, while still brutal, isn’t quite as extensive as in that film. Park’s newest project, The Witch Part 1: The Subversion(called simply The Witch in Korean), is, for many reasons, no I Saw The Devil.
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