Written and Directed by Cradeaux Alexander
Starring Cradeaux Alexander, Rohan Quine, Heather Cairns, Christopher Sherwood
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
On digital September 24

by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer

If you’re not afraid, you’re not alive...

Inherit the Witch starts in 1984, on the day of twins Cory (Max Dimitrov) and Jessie’s (Maddie Crofts) fourteenth birthday. Through some nicely grainy camcorder footage we take in a seemingly normal scene: the siblings blow out the candles on their birthday cake, people chat, the twins’ other sister Fiona (Lily Barkes) refuses to play a game of Twister. Everything seems like an average 14th birthday party - until we see a woman named Pamela (Elizabeth Arends), who is sitting with Cory and requests him to give her his hands.

When Rex (Hugo Wilkinson) approaches, camera in hand, and asks them what they’re up to. Pamela replies that she’s giving Cory “a very special spell for a very special birthday boy”. She neither confirms nor denies she is a witch (spoiler: she is, and half jokes in the next scene that five-hundred years old is closer to her real age), and Rex also asks if he can have a spell. Pamela films Cory as he opens a birthday present from her, but before we see him doing so, the film cuts to thirty years later, and we’re firmly in the present.

We meet with an adult Cory (played by the film’s director, Cradeaux Alexander), who has travelled down to the New Forest area in southern England (historically an area known for witchcraft-related activities, with the village of Burley being the former home of the “white witch” Sybil Leek) for his father’s funeral. He is staying in a remote house with his boyfriend Lars (Christopher Sherwood), and fields a lengthy call from the adult Rex (Rohan Quine) in which we discover that there is a sizable inheritance at stake, and that Fiona (played by Heather Cairns as an adult) - who had emancipated herself from the family some years prior - is also in the New Forest for the funeral. Fiona also calls Cory, and decides to visit him, to Cory’s chagrin.

Fiona’s visit brings up memories Cory had long repressed, What Cory and Fiona don’t know is that Rex is now an acolyte of an ageing Pamela (Imogen Smith) and her coven, and that Pamela has grand plans for Cory...

While the set-up of Inherit the Witch is an intriguing one, the execution of that set-up falls frustratingly short from the second the film cuts to the present. The pacing is very stop and start, and the cuts from the present back to the past happen at seemingly random intervals. Cory’s phone call with Rex goes on for a solid six minutes of exposition and once that phone call finishes, he goes on to another expository phone call with Fiona.

A full forty minutes of the movie is taken up by chatting at Cory’s house, and Cory doesn’t exactly come out of it as someone you’d want to keep following because he’s rather obnoxious, to put it mildly. There’s no real surprise when the events of that birthday party are finally fully unveiled, and you will have guessed at least some of it before the movie tells you. Looking at the storytelling elements beyond the actual plot, the score (by French composer François Evans) is a strange mish-mash of genuinely interesting glitchy synths and out-of-place seventies Doctor Who incidental music. While the cinematography does a nice job of capturing the New Forest and its bright, expansive woodlands, it also gives us some very uneven split screen shots (specifically the shot where Fiona is cycling up to Cory’s driveway and Cory is waiting for her - the shot seems to be divided into a 70/30 split rather than a 50/50, in that we see a lot more of Cory’s driveway than of Fiona cycling).

The last half of the movie is where the witchcraft element finally kicks in properly, but - again - while there are some interesting ideas there, the execution doesn’t meet those ideas. This movie is itching for an injection of folk horror to liven up the witchcraft elements, specifically when it comes to the character of Pamela, as we never get much depth to her beyond “she’s a witch and she’s evil”. I feel it would also have helped if the flashbacks were an active part of Cory’s plot and they happened to him - it would have made him, if not more likeable, than at least more interesting as a character.

It’s a shame, because the bones of something interesting are there, and the cast absolutely do what they can with the material they are given. But, unfortunately, Inherit the Witch does not stick the landing.

It does make me want to visit the New Forest, though.