Saw Season of the Witch

[farla]

Feel kind of unsettled. I think I didn't like it, although I liked the individual pieces fine.

So Season of the Witch starts off with some innocent people being murdered for the crime of being witches. Three of them, and they show the three major reactions of innocent people. They're told their only hope is to admit their guilt, so one confesses and blindly agrees with everything he asks her, one protests that nothing she did was witchcraft, and one tells the priest he'll go to hell for what he does because she's an old woman and has probably seen how this inevitably ends no matter what you say. Then they're all hung and then their bodies are lowered into the water.

Okay, so then the priest says they need to be pulled back out for the last rites or else they'll rise again and he's blown off. We later see him back there at night, struggling to pull the bodies back up. I feel marginally more positive toward the priest because apparently he did believe the women were witches and he's trying to do what he thinks is right. So he pulls up the second one...and it starts to convulse and spit up water, but he keeps reading frantically and it stops. Then he tries to pull up the third one and it jams, and then he falls into the water, and something grabs him but he manages to get out, and then he gets back onto the bridge in time for the body to fly out and attack him. He's hung on the same rope.

So apparently the supernatural is real (which begs the question of why anyone would blow off the bit about giving the last rites, shouldn't this be common knowledge?) and either all bodies not taken care of or ones killed like this get back up. Huh, I think, so it's a feedback loop - you kill people for witchcraft, creating undead monsters that justifiably hate you, and then the priests take it as proof the people were witches. How terribly depressing.

We then switch to the crusades, where two crusader guys are having fun until they're told to massacre a city's civilians and they realize that killing fleeing women and children is actually wrong, so they desert.

Now. They go back toward home, where the bubonic plague is in full force. (And it seems like the bodies might do the same not quite dead thing as the hanged women.) Given this movie has supernatural stuff in it, I immediately expected that it would turn out the plague is connected to the church's actions.

Former crusader guys are found out and told that they'll be forgiven if they escort the witch causing the plague to an isolated monastery, Morals guy tells them to fuck off because he's not getting anyone else killed in the name of god, but he sees the girl, who's been tortured, and realizes that leaving her there isn't any better, so he says he'll take her if they promise to give her an actual trial.

Here's where the problems start. She's really violent toward them, which I thought made sense given she's been tortured and is being brought somewhere to get tortured more and then killed, and she says things about how she's terrified of the priest because of what he does to her and how there are no fair trails for people accused of witchcraft, just torture. The various guys also talk about how they're not sure what they're doing is the right thing and how horrible the church is.

Except she's actually evil.

Now, when she's revealed she does say some stuff about how the witchfinders are actually evil, as are the crusades, except that she's been trying to destroy their faith the whole trip and lied a lot along the way to accomplish that, so why assume that's any more truthful than the rest? I was expecting some sort of link, like that she can manifest because killing all those innocents destroyed people's faith and the sanctity of the churches, but...no. In fact, the demon thing has been around for at least centuries. And its goal was to get to the monastery because they have the last remaining book that can banish it, and the undead accused witch in the opening scene was another person it possessed. So apparently the church actually can fight witchcraft and demons? And by implication, has been all those scenes we saw them murdering innocent people? And they manage to defeat it and free the woman it was possessing, and the one surviving guy is told by Morals Guy to protect her, except how the fuck does he protect her when they live in this horrible world where any random woman can be murdered for witchcraft? Or were all those women actually witches? Is that the moral here? And then the ending narration is her saying they'll tell everyone about how evil was fought and won...so they go back to advocate in favor of the church? And remember the people, including the priest who tortured innocent people into confession, as heroes who did the right thing?

Anyway, someone suggested that it's clever because we assume accused witches are innocent, so it's like a subversion, except that believing they were guilty was the original stance. It's not a brilliant new way of looking at things, it's regressive as fuck.

And I'm particularly uncomfortable because it seemed like the narrative was supposed to be an is-she-or-isn't-she thing for the first chunk, except a lot of the "is she?" stuff was her being violent and desperate. I was expecting it to end up that she isn't, and being violent and desperate is a completely understandable reaction and we should stop being shocked people who are tortured try to fight back instead of using it as proof they're actually guilty and evil, except she actually is guilty and evil.

And lying about getting raped. Because that's sure an idea that doesn't come up enough.

Comments

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

That sounds horrid. :(

[farla.livejournal.com]

It wasn't that bad if you just don't think about any of it. I think it was supposed to be that the church had done bad things and that the demon was an exception, it just...doesn't work well.

But then it was also kind of stressful because of how much of it involves horrible things happening to innocent people, and then there's no resolution on that.

[simon-alexander.livejournal.com]

That movie sounds like one of those desperate ideas one thinks of in the early hours of the morning after 3 days with no sleep.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Sadly, "hey what if witches were actually real and the church was right!?!" comes up far too often for that to be the excuse.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

On a mostly unrelated note, if you ever feel the need to read more about how horrid the 14th century was, A Distant Mirror is excellent. Torture was pretty much the standard way of doing anything.