Jordyn (Paulie Rojas) has been brought up to believe her mother died when she was a baby, and that she has been brought up by her Aunt Ruth (Nancy Wolfe) for eighteen years. However, what she doesn’t know is that while her mother may be dead, when Jordyn was an infant she was rescued from a Satanic cult and brought up for a normal life away from their wicked influence. That is until her eighteenth birthday, which is the same age her mother was when she expired, and when she is celebrating it with a cake and her Aunt, plus two friends, Ruth begins to behave strangely – so strange, in fact, that she takes the knife used to cut the cake and plunges it into her own chest…
Mark of the Witch, also known more vaguely as Another, was a low budget horror effort that claimed to have been picking up where Dario Argento left off, but not as many of those imitators of the Italian maestro’s horrors did by producing a giallo, instead writer and director Jason Bognacki opted for The Three Mothers trilogy that comprised of Suspiria, Inferno and The Mother of Tears itself. You would hope there would be more of the first two than the last, but actually as it played out, in spite of shocker oddities like scenes of birth from the mouth, this was more infused with the plotting of the Harry Potter series where Jordyn was a chosen one struggling to come to terms with her powers and a manipulative villain.
Therefore Paulie Rojas was your grown up Daniel Radcliffe, only female, and Maria Olsen was your Lord Voldemort, showing up at awkward times and generally causing supernatural trouble. If anything, considering the care that went into crafting the woozy, dreamlike visuals and soundscapes this was far too straightforward, with Jordyn realising her plight then doing her level best to resist it as the rest of the small cast of characters variously found themselves victims or victors. Some described it as indebted to The Omen, though it was more The Final Conflict, the third in that trilogy seeing as how the protagonist was grown up and as she had come of age, she was more able to corral her abilities.
We drifted from setpiece to setpiece, seeing characters fall by the wayside, sometimes gruesomely, as our heroine was made to twig all was not right in her world, yet in effect while there was a neat enough tone to it, unless you were overly impressed with the machinations of the Devil in cinematic form, Mark of the Witch was a shade anaemic when it came to delivering the scares. Rojas was a wide-eyed presence who was fair enough as the innocent but didn’t convince so much when her power was put into effect, though Nancy Wolfe’s croaking delivery and saturnine countenance was good casting as the ambiguous Ruth; elsewhere, the other actors aside from a snarling Olsen were not offered a substantial amount to work with.
On the other hand, as a mood piece this was pleasing to a degree, as Bognacki demonstrated enough of a way with conjuring up that almost goth music video style to make this reasonably diverting, suggesting with a weightier script he could create more of an impression, and it was hardly over an hour long anyway which meant it barely overstayed its welcome, assuming you’d welcome a well-trodden path to some familiar scenes. In some ways it was reminiscent of Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem in that the director was more captivated with depicting the occult imagery to bring about his strange atmosphere than he was in the storyline, which could have been any number of “specially picked for significance” young person narratives that proliferated, not just Harry Potter but way back to the young King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, or even Jesus Christ embodying the qualities of God. Only, you know, evil. That this was the opposite of those morally didn’t exclude its relevance to that very familiar storyline.
