One of the giveaways that 2015s The Va-Vitch wasn't as good as everyone thought was the wide diversity in ratings: 91% from Rotten Tomatoes but only 3.5 stars from Ebert. Not that ratings count for much, but Very Serious Professional Movie People love nothing else if not consensus, and the question of what makes a film good is about as boilerplate as one can get.
Anyway, The Va-Vitch is a beautifully shot, surprisingly historical farce that tries to straddle between a slice-of-life period piece about early American puritans in the new world and full-blown supernatural horror. Things open with a family patriarch getting kicked out of an unnamed settlement -- Anytown, USA c. 1680 I guess -- for being too puritanical for the puritans. What led to this point is unclear and never explained, which serves as the first of many, many plot letdowns to come. Not that the audience would get it anyway: dad's mix of gravelly voice and period dialog make just about everything he says a series of unintelligible grunts anyway.
The Va-Vitch was billed as some kind of feminist landmark for it's portrayal of young Tomasin, but the camera spends so much time on mom, dad, Black Philip the goat and dad's abs it's difficult to see her as the protagonist, let alone the movie being told from her point of view. Let's get this out of the way now, since the movie wastes no time either: yes, there's a witch in the woods. So even though we get some chilling scenes of the family discussing whether to marry Tomasin off for extra money and supplies and treating her and her budding feminine wiles as the cause of their woes (instead of, you know, getting fricking exiled), it's all rendered moot by the literal existence of the literal, baby-eatin', boy-screwin', plague-bearin', shape-shiftin' witch.
In this light, I saw the movie from the father's point of view: trying to comprehend supernatural things that don't fit within his narrow, Biblical frame of reference. Faced with an enemy he can't defeat with either shouting or flexing his stomach muscles, he goes slowly insane. Aside: I doubt that's what the filmmakers were going for, but I wonder how much of the hype, reviews, and cover shot of Tomasin stick in the audience's head beforehand -- perhaps she is the protagonist because viewers are told she's the protagonist, but in watching what's actually in the movie, I saw it differently.
Historically, the Salem Witch Trials happened because a kind of grass mold native to the New World, of which Europeans had no knowledge, caused hallucinations in the populace, and their behavior was only explained away as demon possession. This gets hinted at in the Va-Vitch but never developed or explained, and that's what I thought they were going for, until the male heir of the family, Caleb, stumbles across a hut in the woods and the super-sexy witch therein.
At that point, and after the sexy lady has a hot body but an off-camera messed-up arm that snags Caleb and by extension the audience from the far side of Planet Jumpscare, I was completely kicked out of the narrative and couldn't take it seriously anymore, and I also managed to guess the ending. Black Philip is the literal Devil, and invites Tomasin to "live deliciously," (whatever the hell that means, like, open a food truck?) he gores dad to death and Tomasin hacks up her mom. Like other slow-burn horror movies, particularly anything from James Wan, it fulfills the plodding psychological terror erupts into an orgy of blood and violence just before credit roll. In the end, Toamsin gets naked and runs though the woods, finds a whole group of witches doing witchy stuff around a ridiculous bonfire and flies away.
The Va-Vitch (or I suppose to it should've been called The Va-Vitches) has the same problem The Last Exorcism did. Both movies set up as humanistic dramas about ordinary people pulling demons from the pages of the Bible to replace the demons in their own heads, and Last Exorcism was actually quite effective. That is, until you get to the last 60 seconds and a monster-demon lizard baby is born in front of another bonfire and eats a camera crew. I suppose it's a way to reassure an audience of the vast untruth that the monsters on the outside are scarier than the monsters on the inside by always making the monsters on the outside real, tangible and literal.
The thing is, The Va-Vitch is not a bad movie, and I get why people liked it. It's visually arresting and visually immersive, and does use the setting to tell the story to great effect (because I don't know about you but I couldn't understand a thing those mofos said). But by the time Tomasin was flying through woods in her birthday suit, I felt like the end of a 100 minute joke.
* * * * *
A far better movie with demons far more terrifying is 2016s Under the Shadow. Set in Iran in the last year of the Iran-Iraq war (what simpler times: I was 5, my parents were still together and the USA loved Saddam), a missile impacts a middle-class apartment complex in Tehran and bring with it the djinn. In the spirit of getting things out of the way, yes, the djinn are real and literal, but there's more going on here.
Young mom Shideh and her daughter Dorsa wait at home while husband-daddy Iraj is on the front lines as a field medic. Shideh is a med student herself, but because of her involvement in the Iranian revolution, is blacklisted from finishing her studies, becoming a doctor and going back to work. The movie opens, in fact, to a disinterested university admissions director brushing her off while an airstrike takes place in the distance. It's a heartbreaking scene that gives clear context for the rest of the movie -- something the Va-Vitch turns it's crooked nose up at from minute one.
Under the Shadow is, at it's core, an homage to 80s haunted house movies, most notably Poltergeist. The audience spends most of the time in Shideh's apartment and gets to know her daily routines. The scenes of her playing or doing lessons with Dorsa, repeated breakfasts and escape into Jane Fonda workout tapes before the scares build tension for the audience but also build Shideh and Dorsa as human beings. And because the audience is aware of Shideh's political past and why she's stuck in the apartment all day, every day, it allows for a good deal of sympathy -- something The Va-Vitch and its va-vagueness never address.
While it's not as stunning as its naked-in-the-woods counterpart, Under the Shadow pulls off an even more amazing feat in that it's relevant. Shideh and Iraj's brief discussions about the Iran-Iraq war, at the time the largest war that had ever been fought, illustrates the conflict in their marriage but also imparts a good deal of history not well known outside the Middle East. Shideh's clashes with Iranian culture do this as well: her coveted VCR is illegal. And in a twist on Poltergiest et. al., Shideh makes a run out of the haunted house only to be arrested by cultural enforcement police who catch her outside without her head covered. Actress Narges Rashidi manages a good long scene doing her best kicked-puppy face in the movie's most oppressively tense moment at the police station. This kind of period piece is one that is pertinent because parts of the world still function this way.
And that gets back to the final reason I was disappointed in the Va-Vitch: too much is left up to the audience. The hallmark of lazy writing is when names or keywords are used in place of showing. The audience doesn't know why Puritan dad and fam are exiled, but hell, they're Puritans and they're all nuts, am I right? The audience never knows if their life in the settlement is better because it is never shown. It is serviceable enough to feel bad for Tomasin as her kin start to turn against her, but there's no base for their life before, and if history is any lens, it probably sucked just as bad, and having more people around an adolescent woman really just equated to more work to do and a better chance at getting assaulted and then blamed for it. Well to be fair they blamed the devil for most things but she'd have gotten her ass burned at the stake anyway. Puritans riding dirty, that's for damn sure. The audience only ever sees the va-victims of the va-vitch as victims, so it's difficult not to feel bad. But because they aren't people, the audience feels sympathy because it's told to, not because they deserve it.
Alright that's harsh, the baby does. He didn't do nothing. But nobody else. You get one. Damn Puritans.
