The Witch who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976)

 

Matt Cimber’s The Witch who Came from the Sea has the feeling of an elusively personal testament, both by the director and its lead actress Millie Perkins, and of a fragmented investigation into masculinity – the film has its lumpy aspects, while delivering some effective horror-genre body-violation shocks, but also succeeds in elevating the protagonist’s underlying trauma into more than just a hollow motivation for plot mechanics. The film starts with Perkins’ Molly and her two nephews on a largely deserted beach, revisiting an old, disputed family myth of her seafaring father who (perhaps) went lost at sea – she notices some muscle-bound guys exercising nearby, and the film follows her into erotic reverie, hungrily lapping up their physicality. Not long after that, in a sequence placed as fantasy but immediately seeming too behaviorally specific and physically vivid to be only that, she’s with the two guys in a bondage-heavy threesome that soon turns nasty (it’s intriguing how matter-of-factly the camera observes her own partial nudity compared with that of the men), and from there the film navigates between other fraught, can-come-to-no-good encounters with other predatory men, her genuine (almost desperate-seeming) love for her nephews, and an eccentric but seemingly well-balanced live-in relationship with her older employer. The film’s title is metaphoric – Molly isn’t conceived as a supernatural being – but it’s true to the protagonist’s disturbing lack of naturalism: Perkins cleverly moves through a range of different registers - seductiveness, anger, affection – while suggesting they’re all guises of sorts, based in destabilizing past experiences, and Cimber accordingly keeps the viewer nicely off balance regarding the reliability or sequencing of what we’re witnessing. Some aspects – such as the seafaring mythology and Molly’s preoccupation with men seen on television – count for less than may have been intended, and the film is hardly polished, but the rather plaintive ending pulls together its intriguing dynamics, allowing Molly a tenderly forgiving final note, facilitated by the transgressive behaviour of those closest to her.