Today’s quick review: The Witches. After a boy (Jahzir Bruno) loses his parents in a car accident, he goes to live with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) in Alabama, where she slowly teaches him to engage with life again. But when the boy has a close call with a witch, his grandmother takes him to a luxury hotel to get away, only for the boy to stumble upon a convention of witches led by the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway) herself.
The Witches is a family fantasy adventure loosely based on the book by Roald Dahl. The Witches follows the evil-fighting duo of a little boy and his grandmother as they take on a hotel full of child-hating witches. The movie has roughly the same beats as both its source material and the previous film adaptation. However, a slightly more streamlined story makes The Witches easier to follow, if still quite surreal overall.
The Witches takes advantage of modern CGI for an updated look for its witches. Disguised in wigs, gloves, and makeup, the witches conceal snake-like features which they use to prey on children. The look is suitably unsettling, and it allows Anne Hathaway and the other actresses indulge in some macabre slapstick. At the same time, the movie places a lot of weight on the witches’ true form, a reveal that only takes it so far.
As far as story is concerned, The Witches does not have much substance, but it does a better job with its scaffolding than the previous adaptation. The movie manages to work in all the exposition it needs to without feeling entirely unnatural, and the struggle with the Grand High Witch is laid out well enough to feel like an actual conflict. Still, the story is stunted and oddly scoped compared to similar movies, making it an odd choice.
How much you get out of The Witches will come down to taste. Fans of the original Roald Dahl idiosyncrasies will prefer the Anjelica Huston version, which worries less about story and more about its zany conflict. Fans who prefer more grounded conflicts will appreciate the remake’s attempts at keeping everything in perspective. But in any case, The Witches is a surreal movie that will only appeal to specific viewers.
For a Halloween fantasy comedy with a better sense of proportion, try Hocus Pocus.
[5.3 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805647/). I give it a 6.0 to 6.5 for a creative but truly far-fetched story.