Mark Reviews Movies: SPELL (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 29, 2020

"That sounds downright racist to me," says one character in Spell, after our protagonist explains his dire predicament, involving Hoodoo and a malevolent twisting of its practices. Somebody within the movie admits it, at least, which makes the discomforting feeling that screenwriter Kurt Wimmer and director Mark Tonderai are exploiting and pretty overtly demonizing a spiritual tradition for some cheap thrills and scares slightly palatable.

It's best, though, to look at this movie as a minor twist on an old formula. In it, a group of people from the city take a trip to the backwoods, where some country folks display just how unkindly they take to the outsiders' presence. We've seen this setup countless times, often as the foundation for horror, and Wimmer continues that tradition. The twist is that the outsiders and the downhome folks are African American.

That shift also helps to alleviate the feeling that the filmmakers are smearing a form of spiritualism, which historically developed out of the oppressions of slavery and economic injustice. The movie more or less acknowledges this history, although not with enough depth that we really focus on how distasteful the whole premise might be or that the story's antagonists become anything more than evil, supernatural villains. Such thoughtfulness would defeat the movie's purpose, after all, which is solely to make us uncomfortable—and not with the portrayal of Hoodoo exclusively as something worthy of distrust, suspicion, and fear.

The setup involves Marquis (Omari Hardwick), a successful big-city lawyer with a lovely wife named Veora (Lorraine Burroughs) and two teenaged children, Tydon (Kalifa Burton) and Samsara (Hannah Gonera). After briefly establishing Marquis as a cutthroat attorney with few to no moral qualms, the screenplay gets right to the point: Marquis' father, who lived in some foothills in a rural area of Kentucky, has died. The family decides to return to the land of Marquis' difficult childhood for the abusive father's funeral and to set his remaining affairs in order.

While flying a single-engine airplane to the remote area, the family is caught up in a nasty thunderstorm. The plane goes down, and Marquis, alone and surprisingly in good condition, awakens in the attic of a farmhouse.

Tending to him is Eloise (Loretta Devine, menacing with sharp smile and a cheery lilt), an old-fashioned healer in the tradition of root work (aka, Hoodoo) and seemingly kindly older woman. Desperate to get out of there and find out what happened to his family, Marquis meets the rest of Eloise's family: her husband Earl (John Beasley) and a tall, muscular farmhand named Lewis (Steve Mululu). The group get Marquis back to bed, before Eloise renders him unconscious with a dose of some powerful powder.

The course of this story should be pretty apparent. Marquis keeps trying to escape his captivity, and in the process, he learns a lot of disquieting information about the people supposedly taking care of him.

Wimmer's execution of this premise is relatively—and somewhat admirably—restrained. For the most part, Marquis is trapped in that attic, restrained by an injured foot and a locked door. His ventures outside the upper room are limited—first, to the roofs of the house and the barn, where he witnesses a faith revival of sorts involving healing and animal sacrifice, and later, into the house, evading the occupants to find some clues about what has happened to his family. There are some close calls, of course, and, obviously, plenty of terrible sights involving assorted trinkets and a dead body or maybe more. Most of it, though, alternates between a battle of wits, as Eloise tries to play nice and Marquis pretends to naïvely believe her kindness, and a game of cat-and-mouse, as Marquis picks locks and dodges out of view and sneaks into the deeper recesses of the house.

If Wimmer and Tonderai get anything right, it's in establishing a sense of helplessness for Marquis and also in constantly ramping up the eerie feeling that Marquis' caretakers/captors are capable of inevitable horrors and tortures. Eloise crafts a boogity (the equivalent of a voodoo doll) of her patient/hostage—its eyes appearing to follow our protagonist as he searches the attic for anything that might help him—and teaches him about the art of throwing bones—only for Marquis to assemble those bones into an all-too familiar shape.

Most of this, though, feels almost too restrained and certainly too familiar. As potentially unpleasant as the movie's depiction of Hoodoo may be, it's surprising that the filmmakers don't take more advantage of the supernatural power and influence of this exaggerated and demonic variation of the practice. Certainly, the screenplay holds back on the most fantastical spells, curses, and powers until the third act, which has plenty of problems (an awkwardly placed flashback to explain a turn of fortune, a lot of odd decisions based on unclear motives, and scenes in which it seems as if Marquis is able to teleport)—although the all-out display of the villains' true potential isn't one of them.

Spell ends up as an oddity. It's a movie that's superficially insulting but also too superficial and bland to be too offensive.

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