Coven is a short film, maybe ten minutes long. I saw it on a website called indie911. I have since heard that it is on youtube under the keyword arden wohl, which is the name of the writer/director.
It's hard to say much about the film without giving the whole thing away. It's a telling of the familiar Hansel and Gretel fairytale. At first it seems to be simply an animated version of the standard story, but it soon shifts to live action and goes off in its own direction. The two children are abandoned in the forest and become lost after birds eat their trail of bread crumbs, but, unlike in the original, they stumble onto some magic berries and consume them. Hansel soon falls by the wayside and Gretel is left to deal with the witch on her own. This she does, but, instead of destroying her, she becomes her disciple and is inducted into her coven, "never to return" to ordinary life. She does, however, go back to her former home to come to terms with her stepmother.
The film contains no dialog but has a voice-over narrative (read by Leelee Sobieski) that runs from the beginning to the end. The animation and live action cinematography are both simple but effective, and the film, especially after the turning point where the children eat the berries, is very dreamlike - in fact, so much so that it is easy to imagine the narration going over to the first person and turning into a recounting of a dream by a girl or young woman that begins "I dreamed I was Gretel in Hansel and Gretel ..." and goes on to describe exactly what you see in the film.
As a modern interpretation of a traditional fairytale Coven reminded me a lot of the sexually charged stories of Angela Carter, except that it's sparser, more primitive, and closer to the Freudian substrate. The theme is clearly female sexuality and particularly a mother's sexuality as perceived by her children. The stepmother is really not a stepmother at all but (as in the original version of H&G) the children's biological mother. Their exile to the forest is her perceived abandonment of them in favor of her sex partner, their father. The witch is, one way or another, also their mother, as seen by them separately from their mother-child relationship.
In the standard H&G the children overcome the, for them, negative aspects of their mother and restore their nuclear family to its pristine state. In Wohl's version things are different. It is hard to say what exactly happens because the key events are communicated via intense but enigmatic symbolism. The boy goes into a hole (very suggestively drawn in the animation) and is eaten by a snake. The girl seeks out her (step)mother and uses her new found witch's power to put her to rest (at least that's one way of describing it) . In the end, however, the real question to be pondered is not what happens, but what is the ultimate fate, good, bad, or simply different from the norm, of the children.
Coven is undeniably an arty film, but it's not at all a pretentious one. It takes itself seriously, but not too seriously, and it's clear, given the obviously very low budget, that the players, all professionals, did the project for fun and for friendship and not for money or prestige. It may end up not being your cup of tea, but it's only ten minutes long and eminently watchable (not least the nude scenes), so what do you have to lose? Just click on the link and play it and then think about it afterwards as much or as little as you want.
I give it an 8 out of 10.
It's hard to say much about the film without giving the whole thing away. It's a telling of the familiar Hansel and Gretel fairytale. At first it seems to be simply an animated version of the standard story, but it soon shifts to live action and goes off in its own direction. The two children are abandoned in the forest and become lost after birds eat their trail of bread crumbs, but, unlike in the original, they stumble onto some magic berries and consume them. Hansel soon falls by the wayside and Gretel is left to deal with the witch on her own. This she does, but, instead of destroying her, she becomes her disciple and is inducted into her coven, "never to return" to ordinary life. She does, however, go back to her former home to come to terms with her stepmother.
The film contains no dialog but has a voice-over narrative (read by Leelee Sobieski) that runs from the beginning to the end. The animation and live action cinematography are both simple but effective, and the film, especially after the turning point where the children eat the berries, is very dreamlike - in fact, so much so that it is easy to imagine the narration going over to the first person and turning into a recounting of a dream by a girl or young woman that begins "I dreamed I was Gretel in Hansel and Gretel ..." and goes on to describe exactly what you see in the film.
As a modern interpretation of a traditional fairytale Coven reminded me a lot of the sexually charged stories of Angela Carter, except that it's sparser, more primitive, and closer to the Freudian substrate. The theme is clearly female sexuality and particularly a mother's sexuality as perceived by her children. The stepmother is really not a stepmother at all but (as in the original version of H&G) the children's biological mother. Their exile to the forest is her perceived abandonment of them in favor of her sex partner, their father. The witch is, one way or another, also their mother, as seen by them separately from their mother-child relationship.
In the standard H&G the children overcome the, for them, negative aspects of their mother and restore their nuclear family to its pristine state. In Wohl's version things are different. It is hard to say what exactly happens because the key events are communicated via intense but enigmatic symbolism. The boy goes into a hole (very suggestively drawn in the animation) and is eaten by a snake. The girl seeks out her (step)mother and uses her new found witch's power to put her to rest (at least that's one way of describing it) . In the end, however, the real question to be pondered is not what happens, but what is the ultimate fate, good, bad, or simply different from the norm, of the children.
Coven is undeniably an arty film, but it's not at all a pretentious one. It takes itself seriously, but not too seriously, and it's clear, given the obviously very low budget, that the players, all professionals, did the project for fun and for friendship and not for money or prestige. It may end up not being your cup of tea, but it's only ten minutes long and eminently watchable (not least the nude scenes), so what do you have to lose? Just click on the link and play it and then think about it afterwards as much or as little as you want.
I give it an 8 out of 10.