A young woman’s terminal cancer diagnosis has her looking for healing in the dangerous fields of backwoods medicine. A witch offers up a remedy but as anyone who has ever seen anything involving the curative powers of black magic medicine could tell you, there is a hefty fucking fee. Mickey and her loving father struggle with the diagnosis and Mickey decides to seek the assistance of a deep woods dwelling woman with a strong connection to nature and death. This woman had reached out to the girl and Mickey, looking to hold on any way she can, agrees to undergo the three-day stint of death magic and ritual being offered up. Her dad goes along with it because the options are thin and the idea of such a deep loss is fucking terrifying. His disbelief and helpless anger at the situation never rings false and he serves as a solid anchor for the slow spiral into the unknown. It’s a much more important part of the film’s progression than I was expecting. Of course, the heavy focus is placed upon the conjurer and the sick girl where it rightfully belongs, also a centuries-old shame that ties everything together. Presenting witchcraft as it should be to anyone raised on stories of Appalachian disquiet or Hong Kong ickiness, the spells and conjuring here are suitably disgusting. Gorgeous images and scenery meld perfectly with decay and disgust to throw everything on unsteady ground, keeping the audience right where the film wants us to be. Quiet, hallucinatory, personal, beautiful, lyrical and carefully gross. Melodrama detracts a bit but it’s easy to overlook when everything else is so fascinating. A dream steeped in fairytale and corrupted by the inevitability of mortality forming one hell of an intriguing dark fantasy. Not at all what I was expecting and sometimes that’s the best thing a movie can be.
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