“Two Witches” is the first feature from writer-director Pierre Tsigaridis and is the leading film in ARROW’s October lineup. The film stars Rebekah Kennedy (“To the Bone”), Kristina Klebe (Rob Zombie’s “Halloween”), Belle Adams (“Perry Mason”), and Tim Fox (“Westworld”) and tells the stories of two witches and the havoc they wreak on a group of friends.
The film wastes no time getting into the horror. The opening sequence features a crying baby in a candlelit room. One woman emerges from behind a curtain to look upon the baby, and then another. Their grins of admiration quickly turn sinister before the older woman’s face transforms, and she bares her razor-sharp teeth to devour the baby off camera.
One thing worth noting as we talk of the devouring of babies is that this film, particularly its first “chapter,” features a lot of gore involving babies and fetuses. So if you’re sensitive to that kind of imagery, you might want to sit this one out. After all, as one of the characters jokes in the movie, all witches “worship the devil and eat children.”
“Two Witches” is broken into two chapters, each dedicated to one of two witches. Chapter one, “The Boogeywoman,” is admittedly the slower of the two chapters as most of it is spent following expectant mother Sarah (Belle Adams) and her boyfriend Simon (Ian Michaels) as they cope with Sarah’s lingering fear that an old woman they saw in a restaurant has somehow made Sarah ill. (Spoilers. She did; she’s a witch!) When they instill the help of some friends who are into the occult to try and rid Sarah of the negative energy using a Ouija board they bought online, things take a turn for the worse, and this is really where the horror starts to amp up. Severed fingers, fetuses in a bathtub, and a gut gash that spills blood and gore across the screen help cap the chapter. This is also the part of the film where things start to mess with your head, and deciphering what’s real and what isn’t gets a little muddy. Thankfully some of the answers come in the second chapter, “Masha.”
Masha is the chapter’s name, as well as our second witch. Masha (Rebekah Kennedy) lives with her roommate Rachel (Kristina Klebe), who have an interesting dynamic as they are essentially opposites. Rachel is confident and collected, while Masha seems feeble and lost.
Kennedy shines in this role. First, as the socially awkward oversharing college roommate. Then as the confident and brutal witch who will use her powers to get exactly what she wants no matter the cost. The polarity of the character is unsettling, and as she overshares to a fault during her conversations with Rachel, you can’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable, even as a viewer.
Speaking of oversharing, in this chapter, we learn the connection between our witches. It turns out our matriarchal witch from the first chapter is the grandmother of Masha, and Masha’s just waiting for grandma to kick the bucket so she can inherit her powers. Something Masha nonchalantly shares with Rachel as if it were perfectly normal.
“Two Witches” is a wild ride that I applaud most for its visual appeal. In light, the colors are vibrant, almost hyper-realistic. But in the dark, Tsigaridis builds tension and teases you with shadowplay leaving you to search in the dark for something that may or may not be there, much like the film’s characters. It’s a bizarre story about witches that, at times, has you scratching your head but keeps you captivated enough to want to follow it through and see where Tsigaridis is going to take it. I admittedly didn’t love most of the characters, which is why I appreciated the dynamic between Rebekah Kennedy and Kristina Klebe and Kennedy’s off-kilter performance in the film’s second half. The film gets bonus points for some solid upbeat music choices at various spots in the film.
If you’re looking for a bit of a slow burn with an age-old premise about witches told in a fresh and visually stunning way, I’d say check this out. You can catch it now on the ARROW platform.
