The Love Witch

Shot on 35mm to look exactly like a 1969 Technicolor melodrama, and Anna Biller did nearly all of it herself: wrote, directed, edited, scored, and made the sets, the costumes, the paintings and the occult props by hand over several years.

Elaine wants to be loved and uses magic to achieve it. The men she uses it on become emotionally overwhelming and then inconvenient, and she deals with that.

The register is the hard part. It is played in the flat, arch style of the era it is imitating, so a first-time viewer often cannot tell whether it is a parody, a pastiche or entirely sincere. It is sincere about Elaine and merciless about everybody else.

The Renaissance-fair wedding sequence goes on far too long on purpose.

Very funny, and considerably angrier than its surface.