104 min | PG | October 22, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A boy and his grandmother check into a seaside hotel that happens to be hosting a convention of child-hating witches led by Anne Hathaway in full hiss. The premise is pure Roald Dahl menace. The movie sands every sharp edge off it.
A young boy loses his parents and goes to live with his grandmother in 1960s Alabama. She tells him witches are real, that they hate children, and that they hide in plain sight. The two of them flee to a grand hotel to escape one, and walk straight into a convention of them. Robert Zemeckis frames this as a fable about a Black child and his grandmother surviving a world that wants them gone. The setup carries real weight. The film keeps reaching for it and keeps letting it slip.
Anne Hathaway plays the Grand High Witch as pure broad caricature. She rolls her vowels into a vaguely Eastern European snarl and chews every line until there is nothing left. The performance is loud and committed and tonally disconnected from the quieter film around it. Octavia Spencer plays Grandma with warmth and conviction, and she anchors the human scenes that actually work. Jahzir Bruno plays the boy with sincerity. Stanley Tucci wanders through as the hotel manager Mr. Stringer with nothing to do.
Zemeckis directs from a script he wrote with Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris. The film drowns its menace in computer-generated effects. The witches transform through digital morphing that renders del Toro’s instinct for tactile horror weightless and slick. The decision to give the witches three elongated fingers and stretched mouths reads as design provocation rather than fright, and it landed Warner Bros. in a public apology to the disability community. Alan Silvestri’s score swells on cue and tells you how to feel in every scene that the images fail to sell.
This is a property built on dread, handed to a filmmaker who replaces dread with surface. The 1990 version understood that practical effects make a witch terrifying. This one trusts pixels and loses the fear in the process. Hathaway goes big to compensate, and the gap between her register and Spencer’s grounded work never closes. The bones of a real story about survival are here. Zemeckis buries them under digital gloss.