SXSW ’21 REVIEW

SXSW 2021: ‘WITCH HUNT’ Explores a World Where Witches Are Real and Illegal

Name: SXSW 2021: ‘WITCH HUNT’ Explores a World Where Witches Are Real and Illegal
Item: Witch Hunt
Rating: 78
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · March 17, 2021

Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video, or rent or buy on digital (updated October 2026)Watch on Prime Video · Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

America never got past its Salem period in Elle Calahan’s allegorical social horror movie Witch Hunt. The only difference is, in Calahan’s world, witches actually do exist. The United States is a perilous place for those magical few; the practice of witchcraft has been banned and is punishable by death; families of convicted witches are forced into deep-cover and permanent hiding; their only hopes being smuggled south to the Mexican border where freedom from institutionalized prejudice looms.

Gideon Adlon is Claire, a not-quite-typical high-schooler who cliques out with her non-witch girl friends at school before returning home to an undercover witch-on-the-hunt sanctuary. Run by her caring mother (Lost’s Elizabeth Mitchell), their home is a critical stop on the Underground Railroad for escaping witches. With the BWI (Bureau for Witchcraft Investigation) hot on the trail of fleeing underage witch sisters Fiona (Abigail Cowen) and Shae (Echo Campbell), Claire must confront her own prejudices and come to stark realizations about her family’s ties with the witch community in order to rescue her new friends.

An arcane execution by fire opens the film, establishing the extent of punishment and national intolerance for the witch community in a simmering blaze. Calahan’s attempt to tie this fantastical persecution in with our country’s dehumanization of our Southern neighbors, who under Trump were systemically separated from their families, caged, and blanketly vilified as criminals, is obvious and at times disappointingly one-note, leaving this viewer a bit let down and wanting more grit and nuance or at least specificity to how the system functioned. What should have felt like an ostensibly expansive world brought to life with clever detail and galling historicity instead felt small and ever-shrinking.

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The world building is partially to blame. Some time is spent debating the constitutionality of the upcoming ballot issue Prop 6, which will forbid the kin of verified witches to participate in normal everyday life, and we’re presented time and again with normalized dehumanization of the witch community, but there just isn’t all that much boiling beneath the surface.

Take for instance XI Amendment, the last entry in the Bill of Rights which legally forbids the practice of witchcraft. Witches however are not treated to anything resembling a “fair trial” when it comes to the persecution, er prosecution, and we’re left watching them rounded up or executed on sight. It’s unclear whether this is the actions of a rogue few or if the national tide has shifted so far towards authoritarianism that this is a federally condoned practice. Another scene involves BMI agents “dunking” teens to prove that they are not witches. In a mishap, a child dies but there is no consequence. The scene is quickly scuttled to the side and the narrative just carries on.

For a movie that places so much emphasize on the legal status of witches and the laws that govern them, the judicial aspect feels confusing and undercooked. Is this supposed to be a police state? Totalitarianism? Nazi Germany? Have the laws themselves become irrelevant to the pervading vigilantism of BMI? There’s just too little meat dangling from an over-boiled bone to tell. Much like the obnoxiously loud jump scares that more annoy than unsettle, the pieces are there, they’re just not assembled that well.

The chemistry between Adlon and Cowen works well enough and as their coven of understanding takes on new meaning, Witch Hunt smuggles a more human coming-of-age story into its B-movie thriller aspirations. Neither are spellbinding in their own right but Calahan manages to hold it all together enough to cast, if not a perfect spell, one that mixes just enough hopeful magic and genuine empathy into the equation. And that sure isn’t illegal.

CONCLUSION: ‘Witch Hunt’ struggles to execute an allegorical deathblow to real-life systemic prejudice but manages to remain a worthwhile watch for those who want their witchcraft served with a slice of political commentary.