WITCHBOARD (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Witchboard, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 14, 2025

Co-writer/director Chuck Russell's Witchboard is a loose remake of the 1986 horror movie of the same name. That's to say Russell and Greg McKay's screenplay is, according to the credits, only "inspired by" that previous movie, and the two are so dissimilar that one wonders if the sole inspiration was the title itself.

This is a good thing, though, for Russell's film, because it has the freedom to chart its own weird and wholly self-aware course. Unlike the undoing of the '86 movie, this one doesn't take itself so dreadfully seriously. In fact, it's difficult to think of a single moment here that Russell doesn't play with some kind of wink, nudge, or other subtle way of letting us know that this is supposed to be fun and at least kind of, if not very, funny.

The prologue is set in rural France during the late 1600s, where a coven of witches is preparing to perform some sort of vengeful ritual against the man who has led the torment and exile of the witch group's leader. The scene is drenched in creepy atmosphere, from the glowing fire at the center of the meeting to, more prominently, the severed hands hanging from the branches of trees down the path to the meeting place. The captured man's allies recue him, kill some witches, capture their leader, and leave her spirit board on the ground of the forest.

It was found at some point and, in the present day, resides in a museum in New Orleans, where a pair of incompetent bandits wound or kill each other, along with a few cops, while trying to steal it. The board is lost yet again, to be discovered by Emily (Madison Iseman), the fiancée of new restaurateur Christian (Aaron Dominguez), who's about to open a Creole eatery in the city's French Quarter.

That's really the only setup we require, although the script does give us a dastardly villain, cloaked in both dark clothing and the deceptive primness of his English-university background, to boot. He's Alexander (Jamie Campbell Bower), the man who arranged the failed museum robbery and, more to the point, surrounds himself with witchy triplets with long, bleach-blonde braids. His introduction has him order the sisters to slit the throat of the surviving thief, and it's a good lesson for all to pay attention to the floor of any room into which a bad guy might invite you. A large pentagram etched into the floor beneath a chair is probably a good sign to request to meet somewhere more public and less conducive to collecting draining blood.

Alexander is put on hold for a while, which is a good opportunity for the filmmakers to show us what that spirit board can do. It is, according to Christian's ex-girlfriend and convenient expert in Wiccan antiquities Brooke (Melanie Jarnson), specifically a pendulum board, in which a pointer is dangled from a line or chain and swings toward a decorative section of the board's outer ring to provide answers.

Emily's first attempt to use it with her cross pendant, which eventually flies across the room and embeds itself in a wall, unleashes a burning raven from the chimney. For most, such incidents might be perceived as ill omens. Instead, Emily keeps using the board and actually seems more excited once she finds the original pointer hidden inside it. It's a severed skeletal finger, by the way, which might lead some to ask questions about why that's the case. Emily is just too impressed by the board's magical powers, which include her finding her lost engagement ring.

We could laugh at how silly all of this is, but it's also not much of a stretch to interpret that Russell wants us to respond in that way, because he's getting some laughs out of orchestrating the whole thing. Why else would the filmmaker dedicate a lengthy scene to showing us all of the potential dangers in the kitchen of Christian's restaurant, before playing a game of staging how someone "accidentally" winds up with an arm in, perhaps, the last place one would want a limb to end up in this kitchen? That both a ghost, only visible in the reflections of shiny bowls and knives, and a stray cat, which nabs what's detached from the cook and runs off with it as if the feline has found a delectable treat, seem equally responsible for the resulting carnage is pretty funny.

In addition to one more not-so-tragic "accident" on a rooftop, Russell and McKay find other ways to play with this material, too, from a body-swap gimmick that involves the 17th-century witch Naga Soth (Antonia Desplat) to a kind of mass mesmerism that happens at the restaurant's grand opening. Russell shows some devious wit in following the hypnotic foodstuff from the kitchen to the tables (where, included among the patrons, there's a good, old-fashioned throwaway joke about how annoying the filmmaker finds critics), before really setting up the punch line. It happens when the servers put out the most dangerous-looking steak knives a prop person could find.

The look and the timing of the appearance of those knives really solidify Russell's sense of humor here, although the filmmaker's giddily gory, gruesome, and grotesque intentions are pretty clear from the start of the film. Witchboard knows exactly what it wants to do, and it's also smart and wickedly amusing in how it pulls off that effort.

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