Review: War Witch (2012)

Cast: Rachel Mwanza, Alain Lino Mic Eli Bastien, Serge Kanyinda Director: Kim Nguyen Country: Canada Genre: Drama | War Official Trailer: Here

It’s a scene far more familiar to our eyes now than it should ever be: a village’s peace is torn apart by the arrival of gun-toting rebels, whose murderous passage through the community sees rifles thrust into the arms of terrified children and instructions screamed to kill their parents or be killed themselves. Child soldiers are born—in a  perverse manipulation of the circle of life—of death, their youths instantly destroyed in this hellish baptism of gunfire. Immersing us immediately in the chaos of this twisted origin scene, Kim Nguyen proves with War Witch that these horrors of war are—for all their cinematic familiarity—as potent and visceral as ever, the very real traumas they confront us with not diluted by recurrent representation.

There’s a strange quality to Mwanza’s face: a vacancy of sorts, though enriched with buried depth; her eyes bespeak a soul fast becoming hollowed out, yet weighted still with the memories of a better life.

Komona is the subject of the film’s title, the 12 year old resident of an unspecified sub-Saharan African country whose forced murder of her own parents begins a story which—her narration immediately tells us—will move toward the birth of her own child. Played by debuting Congolese actress Rachel Mwanza, whose payment for the role is accommodation and education through to her eighteenth birthday, Komona occupies our attention at every turn, her talk of learning to make the tears go inside her eyes a perturbing testament to the rapidity with which war dehumanises these children. There’s a strange quality to Mwanza’s face: a vacancy of sorts, though enriched with buried depth; her eyes bespeak a soul fast becoming hollowed out, yet weighted still with the memories of a better life. The immersive tragedy of Mwanza’s performance forms the core of the film, rigidly supporting the story as certain scripting issues begin to see it sag around her. Nguyen’s screenplay is perhaps somewhat too structured, its clearly delineated acts—each occupying precisely one third of the running time—and nicely summative voiceover contributing a narrative neatness that, while undoubtedly a sign of economic storytelling, withholds any sense of emotional immediacy. Hampered to a degree by elements shared with no shortage of films before it, powerful as they may remain, War Witch makes its mark in the innovation of Nguyen’s direction: he employs a number of striking visual motifs, most prominently and effectively the appearance throughout the narrative of various “ghosts”.

The generational gap and the shifting prospects across it are at the heart of War Witch, a film of unlikely optimism despite its traumas.

Arriving courtesy of the conceit of “magic milk”, the hallucinogen whose premonitory effects earn Komona the titular role, these ghosts steer the film toward the territory of magic realism, their daunting background presence imbuing each scene with a strange mix of horror—their initial appearance, brilliantly handled, is terrifying—and profound sadness. There’s a deeply harrowing scene where a huge horde of them appear in the distance, shot slightly out of focus, walking agonisingly slowly toward Komona. At every turn she is pursued by these spectres, standing as monuments to every death she has been forced to cause, every life truncated in order to preserve what remains of her own. It’s this distinctive manner of presenting the dichotomy between death and life—as represented by the ever-nearing birth—that allows War Witch to step forth from the shadow of similar films, to free itself of the burden of comparison and assume its own identity as a potent piece of cinematic storytelling. It’s not only life that Komona’s child represents, of course: it exists too as allegorical shorthand for the future, a dim sliver of brightness cast against the engulfing dark of the past and its ghosts. The generational gap and the shifting prospects across it are at the heart of War Witch, a film of unlikely optimism despite its traumas. At one point in the movie an exhausted Komona, trudging down a country road as she has done all day, is offered a ride in a truck. “I don’t have any money,” she shrugs. “No one has money,” laughs the driver. As she clambers onto the back of the truck, joining the dozens of other passengers, we see why Nguyen never opts to tell us where we are. His film is no more the story of one country than it is the story of one girl.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

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