South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival – Though our present seems pretty dystopian already, in an alternate dystopian present-day created by writer/director Elle Callahan, her new film, Witch Hunt (2021) explores a society that feels plagued by witches. Set to screen as part of SXSW Online 2021’s section titled “2020 Spotlights,” Witch Hunt is surprisingly emotional (but not in an emo-teen sort of way), addressing ties of family and friendship, as well as death and loss.

Witch Hunt follows a teenage girl, but thankfully, somehow it side-steps that typical YA (young adult) movie feeling. Perhaps that all too familiar (and annoying) kind of atmosphere is missing because Witch Hunt is devoid of pop or rock music and any sort of pandering-type humor, like in many witchcraft-themed movies that try to re-capture the magic of The Craft (1996). Witch Hunt is a teen-witch film that is decidedly fresh with a premise all of its own — surprisingly, it doesn’t remind me of that benchmark horror film at all, as Witch Hunt‘s tone, content, and emotional toll reach far greater levels of maturity, in my opinion.

Witch Hunt follows Claire (Gideon Adlon), a high school girl who lives with her two young brothers and widowed mother on the outskirts of the U.S./Mexico border. Unbeknownst to their paranoid and watchful neighbors, the family offers their home as a safe-harbor for witches, who are outlawed as criminals and hunted by a government agency. Claire is at first an unwilling participant, but when two orphaned sisters come under her family’s care, Claire finds common ground with the eldest sister, Fiona (Abigail Cowen), as well as a common enemy that is out to get them.

With discussion of border patrol policies in the film and having the Mexican government granting asylum to witches while the U.S. does not, writer/director Elle Callahan imbues the film with clear parallels to the current United States practice of strict border patrol policies. This intellectually aware film further parallels the persecution of slavery as the film utilizes an underground railroad-like system as one of its plot points, as well as archaic forms of “witch testing” made more terrifying with modern technology.

I appreciate the small details that amass to the great supernatural thriller that is Witch Hunt — it has understated but beautiful special effects to portray magic in the film, it has short setups to jump scares that have effectively scary payoffs, and its teen characters actually look like teenagers. I am continually impressed with Elle Callahan as a writer and director, as she also directed one of my favorite indie films of 2018, Head Count, another supernatural horror genre film. Now with Witch Hunt, Callahan takes the seemingly bygone monster of old human anxieties, the witch, and retrofits it to sync with modern-anxieties of “the other” seamlessly, showing that one of the greatest monsters of all time is in fact human fear, rather than the so-called monsters that we create in others.

Witch Hunt reviewed as part of our South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival coverage.

7 out of 10