All of Them Witches

Rating

Director

Daniel Gruener

Screenplay

Gabriel Gonzalez Melendez (Story: Gabriel Gonzalez Melendez)

Length

1h 40m

Starring

Susana Zableta, Alejandro Tommasi, Ricardo Blume, Delia Casanova, Francis Laboriel, Roberto Cobo, Zaide Silvia Gutierrez, Lety Gomez

MPAA Rating

PG

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
North American audiences have a tough time accepting films made in languages other than English. Many filmgoers appear to feel intimidated by unfamiliar storylines and situations and are put off by subtitles, so largely ignore foreign films. Unfortunately, these folks are missing a lot, including wonderful stories from other lands that don’t fit the pattern of most American movies. One such film is All of Them Witches, known in its original Spanish as Sobrenatural.

This is a Mexican film about a young woman whose best friend is murdered outside her door. The circumstances surrounding the death are desperately mysterious. Susana Zabaleta plays the neurotic Dolores with great charisma and flair in her big-screen debut. She’s believable as the frightened woman who must come to terms with her friend Eva’s death and the bizarre situations surrounding it.

Also new to the silver screen, Alejandro Tomassi plays Dolores’ untrusting husband Andres who tries to keep her safe by forcing her to remain indoors, but ultimately fails in his task. She leaves in search of clues in Eva’s apartment and discovers a strange missive scrawled on a piece of paper hidden in the pages of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Le Horla. The note refers to someone named Madame Endor. Dolores seeks out this peculiar witch-lady, played by Delia Casanova and discovers several more pieces of what becomes a growing puzzle. She takes what she discovers and puts it to use finding that nothing is what it first seems.

Those who aren’t accustomed to foreign language films often find that video is a good place to start. You don’t need to worry about missing dialogue, because you can rewind and catch anything that you miss, either in terms of events or subtitled dialogue. With All of Them Witches, it’s not difficult to keep up with the dialogue, because the language is simple and quick. Perhaps that’s what keeps the film afloat. It’s lively, suspenseful and ultimately fulfilling.

This film doesn’t have a lot of faults. The performances are all wonderful, including the lovely and talented Zabaleta. The art direction is beautiful and the cinematography is equally stunning. There are, however, some noticeable problems with the sound that might disturb some viewers who are accustomed to the technical near-perfection of most Hollywood productions..

All of Them Witches explores the dark recesses of witchcraft and voodoo, and it makes it easy to understand why many people find these subjects frightening. Many horror films have dealt effectively with the topic, but this one – with an English language title borrowed from a line in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby – doesn’t just vilify witchcraft, it simultaneously exalts it. It tells us that it is the desires of the wielder that make witchcraft good or evil.

This is an exciting film with a delightfully philosophical story. It has moments of lucidity and confusion, but in the end it’s a pleasing ‘foreign’ film that doesn’t clamour to fit a mould enforced by studio executives.

Review Written

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