‘The Witch: Part 2’ Goes Bloodier But Loses Focus [Fantasia 2022 Review]
Park Hoon-jung’s (writer of I Saw the Devil) The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion barreled its way into the superhero canon. With its uber-violent, horror-tinged take on conventional superhero origin stories, it stood out. Not that the first film’s protagonist, Kim Da-mi’s Ja-yoon, was strictly speaking a hero. But the mythic, good versus evil structure was there. Ja-yoon escaped from a lab in childhood and was resultantly adopted by a rural family. Ostensibly an amnesiac, Ja-yoon grew into a well-adjusted young woman, only to find the organization that imprisoned her on her trail. It’s ridiculous and overstuffed. The kind of gonzo palate cleanser tellingly dethroned in Korean cinemas by none other than Ant-Man and the Wasp. Both a direct sequel and not, Hoon-jung returns with The Witch: Part 2: The Other One, maintaining the same self-aware titling while piling on considerably more viscera and excess.
The Witch: Part 2: The Other One opens with a grim flashback. Then, the film jumps forward to scenes of a young girl (Shin Sia) awakening in the midst of a violent lab massacre. She ambles through the woods directly into the life of Kyung-hee (Park Eun-bin), another young woman enduring frequent, violent harassment. Blood is spilled and Kyung-hee takes the young girl in. Like the first, sundry sinister forces converge, all of whom are desperate to find the girl with the powers.
While The Witch: Part 1 was most often maligned for packing its slim narrative to the brim with visceral excess, The Witch: Part 2: The Other One doubles down, ping-ponging between several distinct narrative threads, none of which yield nearly as much interest as the Kyung-hee focal point. While there is ostensibly a great deal more going on, it lacks urgency. Timelines are confounding and transitions feel arbitrary. Hoon-jung shifts from present to past and antagonist to protagonist on a whim, stalling momentum with distinctly Western credibility.
In fact, in many ways, The Witch: Part 2: The Other One feels considerably more commercial than the first. For all its excesses, the first entry was a transgressive, welcome restructuring of superhero mythos. It honored blockbuster beats while imbuing its narrative with perverse, frenetic, and violent touches. The Witch: Part 2: The Other One, at times, feels akin to Colin Trevorrow’s The Witch: Part 2. The humor is broader and not as dark. The action is bigger, and curiously, there is considerably more English dialogue than there was in the first. The action loses spectacle with shaky effects and cartoonish staging. At over two hours, The Witch: Part 2 only arrives at an interesting place in its final act.
That final act, however, is a joy to behold. Questionable effects constrain the action some, though it delivers the exact kind of violent, superhuman spectacle audiences worried Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness might. Villains explode bodies. Knives sever heads. Telekinesis fashions farm fencing into a maelstrom of stakes, impaling every unlucky bit player in the vicinity. Consider it the Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula effect. While tonally The Witch: Part 2 feels disconnected from the first, its excess soon takes shape. What it lacks in the searing tension of the original, it more than compensates for with buckets and buckets of blood and glorious incredulity.
Park Eun-bin and Shin Sia are especially great, and in those quiet moments, The Witch: Part 2 achieves the same melancholic spectacle as the first. Final act developments pose curious directions for a sequel, making it clear that The Witch has a little life left in it yet. While Park Hoon-jung’s sequel is an expected development, it is an intermittently disappointing one. The Witch: Part 2 loses the heart and fierce tension of the first by dint of its size. Still, horror fans who might wonder what an R-rated Marvel feature might look like need not look far. The Witch: Part 2 is certain to deliver.
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The Witch: Part 2: The Other One
Summary
The Witch: Part 2: The Other One is bloody, ridiculous, and a little too big for its britches.
