Props to Luca for having a ton of ideas-- historical fascism allegory! topple the patriarchy! giallo gore fest!-- but they did not balance well imo. Combine that with the fact that he chooses like five different visual styles that he shifts between depending how he's feeling, and... yeah, it's not boring, it's just all over the place.

Tilda as Old Man is, as Deebot put it, dumb. He's the patriarchal character, but they want it to be played by a woman, but they also want no one to be able to tell it's a woman with photo-realistic makeup and a fake actor name... huh? Combine that with the fact that his/her storyline is faaaaaar less interesting than the rest of the movie, and it really drags the rest of the movie.

I also agree with Deebot that I was emotionally disconnected, likely due to the revelation that Susie is, in fact, the Mother of Sighs. I hardly felt anything resembling a "journey" from her, and she doesn't seem terribly conflicted about anything going on. Dakota Johnson also, while she's terrific at playing the lording Mother in the finale, really doesn't give me much for the first 2 hours and 15 minutes of movie. It's obviously intentionally internalized, but that's... a tough choice to get me to care, especially in a movie like this. Mia Goth elicits a much greater emotional reaction from me, but it's deadened by the fact that her fate is projected a million years away-- she's clearly only there as witch fodder.

The few #WokeWitch bits mostly got eye rolls from me, and the fascist background mostly reminded me of regional Shakespeare adaptations-- "it's Taming of the Shrew, but in Gangland 1920s! It's King Lear but with Nazis!" etc. Individual lines/scenes work, but as I try to put it all together into something relatively coherent... I can't. Maybe I'm just stupid.

I can see why people would like it despite the mess-- Lord knows I've loved some messy movies in my day-- but this didn't really do it for me. I admire Luca for putting his shit all the way out there and for taking his clout from his last two movies and saying "ok I'm going to do something audacious and pretentious and insane like THIS" with it. But... yeah, it seems like it's got a buckshot approach to its Big Ideas, which diminishes the overall impact of the stuff that does work imo.

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