UK Release Date: 27-06-2011
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Dominic Sena
Country: US
Distributor: Momentum Pictures Home Entertainment

On paper, at least, Season of the Witch sounds like a delightful medieval romp; Nic Cage and Ron Perlman as world-weary crusaders escorting a suspected sorceress across plague-stricken Blighty? Why, throw in some Eric Clapton and a dash of Joe Pesci and it’s practically Lethal Weapon 2. Sadly, however, such promise is quickly scuppered by the unnerving realisation that the film is a plodding exercise in inanity for which you paid £7, mainly to see Cage look like a homeless Chad Kroeger.
 
So, we follow Nic and Ron’s disillusioned 13th Century knights, who return to England from slaughtering a conglomerate of infidels only to find it subsumed by the Black Death, which the clergy identify as the work of a suspected young witch (Claire Foy). Instructed by a dying cardinal (Christopher Lee) that the only way to save the populace is to transport the girl to a monastery where she can be properly tried, they are accompanied by a host of dispensable archetypes (haunted knight, weaselly trickster, wide-eyed greenhorn, and so on) in traversing an underwhelming landscape of misty plains, spooky woods and hokey villages.
 
Besides the aforementioned epidemic, one of the film’s chief blights is its jarringly maladjusted sense of reality; the film’s opening sequence (an atmospheric, suspenseful creepshow to which everything that follows is but a sorry anticlimax) sees one priest hang and drown several women suspected of witchcraft, before being brutally murdered by one of them as she flies triumphantly out of the waters – donning monster makeup seemingly taken from one of the earlier episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and enacts her vengeance. So far, so supernatural.
 
However, one of the film’s subsequent primary plot threads is the ambiguity of whether Foy is indeed a cauldron-cradling hag or simply a tortured young girl, and how the group escorting her respond to this question. In a world where it has already been established that magic and monsters really do exist, though, this is rendered completely absurd, and only made worse by the frequent revelation that Foy indeed possesses unearthly powers (as given away in the theatrical trailers). Highlighting such a major plot hole may sound pedantic, but its presence disturbs one’s enjoyment of the film: when the world the filmmakers want you to invest in itself doesn’t make sense, it makes it hard to care about anything that follows.
 
In a similarly uncanny vain, one’s attention is also drawn to the sanitized laziness which dogs the film’s visual style. Murky and sombre-hued as Season’s world might be, there’s something distressingly sterile about it all – never once does the grime and grit that our protagonists trawl through convince. Foy, for example, may be sold to us as a tortured and innocent victim long locked in a filthy dungeon, but her face is washed perfectly clean. And for all the admittedly impressive plague effects, one never feels disgusted by what is supposedly a disgusting world.
 
Bereft of any especially invigorating scares or set-pieces (the best the film can muster is an overlong sequence involving the crossing of a rickety bridge), the film seemingly makes no effort to entertain its audience; early attempts at fraternal banter between Cage and Perlman feel forced, and are quickly dropped, whilst a shrug-worthy third act plot “twist” (really more of a kink; a meander at best) barely registers. Everything about the film simply screams (at best) adequacy, its refusal to ever aspire above this being perhaps what offends most. Its steadfast devotion to crap movie tropes even extends to the standard “monster-laden CGI showdown” come the final 30 minutes; we’re only a David Wenham performance and dodgy PS2 tie-in away from Van Helsing here, people.
 
This even applies to poor old Cage himself – his performance is certainly sincere but it also feels strangely muted and crucially lacking that one scenery-chewing “Cage Moment” that has defined his performances of late. The rest of the cast, meanwhile, are generally rather good in sadly unmemorable roles; Perlman is typically likeable, whilst Foy, Ulrich Thomsen and Stephen Campbell Moore all put in decent performances. One wonders, though, why Stephen Graham (in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance) was told to imbue his character with a Chicago brogue.  
 
In sum, Season of the Witch disappoints; not because it’s unrelentingly bad, but rather because it’s so unrelentingly inert.