Although I will likely be disemboweled from my toes to my nose (metaphorically speaking only, I hope) for this proclamation, I didn’t think Season of the Witch was all that bad!*

Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman star as two Crusaders who abandon their army, weary of the unfathomable bloodshed in the name of a supposedly benevolent God. Hauled before the magistrate and charged with desertion, they are given one chance to redeem themselves by agreeing to transport a young woman accused of being a witch to a remote mountain monastery for an exorcism. Their journey is arduous and fraught with peril. Along the way, the men begin to question the girl’s guilt and in doing so, open themselves up to a manipulative, scheming evil spat up from the bowels of hell itself.

Season of the Witch takes the familiar exorcism story and cleverly reframes it in a medieval setting. Whatever else you might say, the film at least takes itself and its production values seriously and, as such, avoids much of the campyness one might anticipate. I enjoyed a good deal of the heroes’ quest, though I am the first to admit that rickety bridges and wolf attacks in the dead of night are not the most original obstacles. Aside from a script that has its 15th century soldiers speaking as if they are in the 21st, Season of the Witch’s most glaring hurdle is its talent. There are certain actors—some of them great actors (here’s looking at you De Niro)—who, for one reason or another, just look ridiculous when placed in period pieces and asked to play dress-up. Nicolas Cage is one such actor. That is he paired with Perlman, a performer known for his camp quality, only exacerbates the problem.

*And now we come to my spoiler-filled qualification: As much as I was enjoying and even overlooking some of Season of the Witch’s rougher edges early on (a familiar story, atrocious casting and second-hand obstacles), when it came to the film’s conclusion, it was impossible to do anything other than throw up my hands and marvel at the bombastic stupidity of it all. And I’m not talking about the sudden appearance of demonic zombies, giant bat monsters and other gargantuanly stupid aspects of the film’s oblique shift into a second-rate monster movie. The thing that both disappointed and outright angered me was the film’s confused and schizophrenic philosophical narrative.

Were you to watch all but the final act of Season of the Witch, you would come away from the film thinking it was written as an indictment against the Christian God—a film that does not deny God’s existence, but rather his omniscient goodness. “Ever get the feeling God has too many enemies,” Perlman’s character asks while extricating his sword from a Saracen’s belly early on in the film. “Being his friend is not very easy either,” comes Cage’s response. Throughout their journey, Cage is shown as kindhearted and empathetic to the young girl accused of calling down the Black Plague. He has seen the Holy Scriptures twisted into declarations of war and watched as innocents were slaughtered by men using faith as a bludgeon to mask their own superstitious delusions. He wants nothing more to do with a system that accuses without proof and butchers without mercy. Season of the Witch even allows the devil to speak in his own defense, and one would find it difficult to dispute the Dark Lord’s line of reasoning. In many ways, much of the film makes the devil out to be the lesser of two supernatural evils, and for a moment or two very nearly a Miltonic hero. The script goes a long way in setting up skepticism as the only rational manner of looking at the world. And then, in the bottom of the ninth inning, it subverts it all.

Like The Rite, Season of the Witch is actually a church recruiting film in disguise. It utterly undermines its previous message, and points an accusatory finger at any audience member foolish enough to have been taken in by it. See how easily the devil can bamboozle you, it seems to cackle mockingly. In this movie, kindness and empathy are weaknesses. It suggests those repugnant battlefield commanders and abusive priests who called for wrath and damnation were right all along. They were merely matching their defense against the intensity of the enemy’s offense. Cage’s humanitarianism is shown to be misplaced and more to the point, dangerously in league with none other than the devil himself. The ends, Season of the Witch seems to declare, do indeed justify the church’s means—even when those means are treachery and genocide.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Dominic Sena
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell Moore, Claire Foy, Robert Sheehan, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, Christopher Lee
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence and disturbing content.
Running Time: 95 minutes