At least Anne Hathaway is having a good time in HBO Max’s ‘The Witches’

HBO Max’s new adaptation of The Witches is largely a bore: not strange enough to be spooky, not sweet enough to be touching, not smart enough to be deep. It retains neither the horror of Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation nor the cleverness of Roald Dahl’s 1983 novel (though those versions had their problems too), and ends up the kind of mediocrity we’re all too used to seeing on our subscription streaming services.

But there is one person who’s clearly having the time of her life with it, and that’s Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch. Good for her.

It’s not Anne Hathaway’s best performance ever, but it might be her most performance ever, and thank God for that.

Hathaway doesn’t just chew the scenery in this movie. She cracks open her face almost ear to ear with the aid of VFX magic, and then gulps it down whole. She swans around in slinky gowns trimmed with snake — an actual (CG) snake, because snakeskin is for nonmagical suckers — and screeches orders in a bizarre pan-European accent that involves pronouncing the word “garlic” like “gorrlick.” It’s not her best performance ever, but it might be her most performance ever, and thank God for that, because it’s the only thing keeping The Witches alive. 

Otherwise, the movie is an unimaginative affair. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis, Guillermo del Toro, and Kenya Barris, the new The Witches is more or less faithful to the plot of Dahl’s novel. An unnamed child protagonist (Jahzir Bruno) gets turned into a mouse by a very powerful coven of witches and, with the help of his grandmother (a very warm and very game Octavia Spencer) and his two new mouse friends (Kristin Chenoweth and Codie-Lei Eastick), sets out to stop them from making mice out of any other kids.

The changes this movie does make include a drastic change in setting. This version takes place in late ’60s Alabama, and the boy and his grandma are a working-class Black family staying at a hotel that primarily caters to wealthy white people. (The witches staying there are a pretty diverse group, though.) The choice of lodging is explained in an offhand comment that witches look to target “poor and overlooked” people who won’t be missed — which seems like the start of some deeper commentary on race and class in America, but turns out to be basically everything the film has to say on the subject.

Similarly, themes of death and religion are suggested but so under-explored they may as well never have been brought up at all. The boy starts the film grieving the death of his parents, and ends it wondering when he himself might die, and the message he gets at either end is that it’s all up to God. In between, though, neither God nor the Grim Reaper have much to do with the proceedings. Everyone’s too busy trying to “mouse-ify” each other to worry about anything else.

Which sounds like it should be fun, right? But these hijinks feel stale, without a single memorable chase sequence or CG creation in them worth admiring. The tone remains insistently sunny, which robs The Witches of the dark and delicious power it held in other iterations, of that sense that real evil might lurk in places where you least expect it. These heroes never seem in danger of hurt feelings, let alone serious bodily harm. It’s all too bland to be offensive or frightening or annoying, which may be enough for some just looking to pass the time with a family-friendly distraction. But it feels like kid stuff, and not in a good way.

Except, that is, when Hathaway’s doing her thing. It’s not that her performance is more sophisticated than the rest of the movie, but that she seems determined to come out of it the one thing adults meme immediately afterward, and kids reminisce about fondly years and years later. That she succeeds, and in doing so almost singlehandedly turns The Witches from forgettable filler to a mild curiosity, is what true sorcery looks like. 

The Witches is now streaming on HBO Max.

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