Season of the Witch movie review (2011)

After about a dozen years of this, we pause for a discussion between the two hero Crusaders, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman). Yes, Cage and Perlman, so you suspect “Season of the Witch” will not be an exercise in understatement. “The killing of the women and children must stop!” they agree. Having arrived at this conclusion after 12 years of rape and pillage, they do not qualify as quick studies. The comrades abandon the armies of the Crusades, hit the road and happen across a town somewhere in the vastness.

They have an excellent reason for ending up here, of all places: Why, this is the very same town of the pre-title sequence! Where three women were forced to confess to witchcraft, thrown backward off a bridge with nooses around their necks, hung dead and then prudently drowned in the river below! We liberals are earnestly deploring the superstition that forced them to confess Salem-style, until they spring back up from the dark waters, and, hey, they actually were witches. Sometimes Glenn Beck is right.

Time has passed since that day (whether the full 12 years, I cannot say), and Behmen and Felson are quickly assigned to convey a surviving (if technically dead) witch (Claire Foy) to a distant monastery where there is a crumbling ancient tome containing the only known incantation that can exorcise her and bring an end to the Black Plague — so, hey, we're back in medieval Europe now, specifically Hungary. A possible clue to this film's mindset as a Buddy Movie is that the Claire Foy character has no name and is known only as The Girl. Not even The Witch.