By JENN ADAMS
Starring Nathan Wallace, Elise Finnerty, Jenna Rose Sander
Written and Directed by Elise Finnerty
Jinga Films
In the wake of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the term witch became a battle cry. After the first female candidate to win a major party nomination was defeated by a man who openly bragged about sexual assault, many of us took to the streets to protest a patriarchal system that seemed to get more regressive by the day. As the conservative movement is continuously devoured by Evangelical Christians intent on transforming the world into a narrow system of gender stereotypes and female oppression, many women have turned towards witchcraft and alternative spirituality offering autonomy and choice. We’ve embraced the freedom to be ourselves as well as the anger that we were ever denied this power to begin with. This collective awakening has come with a desire for retribution; to turn our fear against anyone even remotely connected with misogynistic oppression. Elise Finnerty’s film THE ONES YOU DIDN’T BURN attempts to harness this rage with a revenge story centuries in the making.
After a hard-fought year of sobriety, Nathan (Nathan Wallace) returns to his childhood home to settle the affairs of his recently deceased father. Shortly before his death, the family patriarch had been trying to contact Nathan and his younger sister Mira (Jenna Rose Sander) to warn them about a mysterious group still angry about ancestral sins. Arriving at their family’s farm, the siblings meet Alice (Finnerty), a local who’s been helping their father on the farm. Though openly hostile to Nathan, she takes Mira under her wing and tries to help her connect with the gorgeous and fertile land. Nathan reunites with his own childhood friend and quickly falls back into the bad habits he’s worked so hard to leave behind. Even worse, a mysterious woman has been haunting his dreams with a strange mix of menace and seduction. As the siblings decide what to do with the land they’ve inherited, the forces that killed their father reemerge to seek revenge on the last remnants of their family’s bloodline.
Finnerty excels at making witchcraft look like a magical system of female connection. These witches do not hover over cauldrons and scrape moss from moonlit gravestones. They honor the natural gifts that surround them and engage in therapeutic tarot readings in the afternoon sun. Their powerful confidence feels intrinsically connected to the gorgeous landscape and it’s nearly impossible not to want to join their empowering coven. The word witch is never mentioned, but connections to paganism are inescapable as is the implication that members of this sisterhood were once burned by a patriarchal mob.
Finnerty draws the battle lines according to gender though it’s occasionally difficult to determine her intended villain. Though he struggles to escape, Nathan is a part of a patriarchal system of dominance built on manipulation and laying claim to anything men desire. We’re introduced to him as a tortured soul in need of comfort and his father a tragic victim. His vile friend Greg epitomizes toxic masculinity making the subdued Nathan look like a saint in comparison. When he suspects that Alice has ulterior motives, we have no reason not to join him in his suspicions especially when we meet her friend Scarlett who bears a striking resemblance to the woman haunting Nathan’s dreams. Alice and Scarlett befriend Mira and try to lure her away from her workaholic lifestyle. She’s been struggling to support the floundering men in her life and the moment she finally admits her fatigue feels like a cathartic victory. However, the final act complicates this dichotomy and leaves us with uncomfortable questions about who the real victims are.
Finnerty’s film takes its title from the feminist mantra “We’re the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.” Paraphrased from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook, this sentiment encapsulates the feminist desire to embody the aggression we’ve spent our lives fighting off and to take revenge for centuries of gender-based oppression. Though empowering, this statement is misleading at best and appropriative at worst. First, by all accounts, the women hanged in the Salem Witch Trials were not occult practitioners but women and girls falsely accused by a zealous mob. Second, this phrase combined with Finnerty’s narrative implies a legacy of witchcraft in the United States. Though certainly possible that witches have been burned since the Mayflower first made landfall, women accused of witchcraft were more commonly burned at the stake in Europe.
Finally, a modern witch is much more than an angry feminist. Practicing witches do not center their practice on revenge, but on a pagan lifestyle that honors the elements of nature and fosters spiritual guidance in connection with the magical forces that surround us. Alice and Scarlett seem to be practicing authentic witchcraft, but the finale makes this empowering lifestyle feel like a ploy to satisfy a long-held grudge. They purport to want revenge for the theft of their ancestral land, but the all-white cast makes no mention of the indigenous people who originally occupied the territory in question. The film carries an empowering message, but it oversimplifies a complicated legacy of religious oppression by conflating it with straightforward misogyny and comes dangerously close to implying that witches are man-hating villains.
Despite these problematic elements, THE ONES YOU DIDN’T BURN is a lush and engaging thriller. Aside from an artificial opening scene, the film is framed to highlight the beautiful land and convince us that it’s worth dying to protect. The entire cast delivers incredible performances with Wallace and Finnerty in particular dancing across the lines dividing heroes and villains. Finnerty excels behind the camera as well and the story unfolds with an intoxicating visual language that allows the audience to come to its own conclusions. The relatively sparse plot does not belabor the point or overstay its welcome. At just 70 minutes, the film feels like a pagan parable or cautionary tale depending on which side of the story you happen to fall. Despite tricky underlying assumptions, THE ONES YOU DIDN’T BURN will find a way to make its point known and weave its message of feminist empowerment into your heart.
THE ONES YOU DIDN’T BURN became available on VOD and digital on June 13, 2023.
