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| Images courtesy of Film.UA |
Ukrainian author Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko’s 1833 satire The
Witch of Konotop initially published in his second book Little Russian
(Ukrainian) Stories told a fourteen-chapter sage involving a Cossak
centurion of Konotop named Mykyta Uslasovich Zabryokha, his clerk Pistryak and
the witch Yavdokha Zubikha. Regarded as ‘perhaps
the best work of Ukrainian prose of the early 19th century’, it told
of a witch hunt that led to a real one casting spells on the villagers
including arranged marriages amongst the residents. Adapted for Ukrainian television in 1987 and once
more in 1990 for Dovzhenko Film, it was also performed as live theater for the
Ivan Franko National Academy Drama Theater in 1982 and as a burlesque rap
performance in 2016. While entrenched in
Ukrainian lore and iconography, the concept of The Witch of Konotop would
invariably come up again in 2022 following Russia’s ongoing military invasion
of its neighbor.
Stemming from a viral video from the occupation of Konotop,
it depicted a woman berating the occupiers saying ‘Don’t you know where you
are? You’re in Konotop. Every other woman here is a witch. You’ll never get an erection, starting tomorrow’. It is important to include every explicit
detail of this enraged condemnation of Russian forces before going into
director Andriy Kolesnyk’s 2024 Ukrainian supernatural horror film The Konotop
Witch or as it has been retitled internationally The Witch. Revenge,
a film that loosely stems from the lore generated by the literary Ukrainian
legend as a response to the ongoing invasion.
Concerning an ancient witch named Elena (Tetyana Malkova) living with a
young Ukrainian man named Andriy (Taras Tsmbalyuk), the couple are living
happily together until the Russian invasion of Ukraine begins. Fleeing the city, they are intercepted by
Russian forces who kill her husband but not before she escapes, regroups with
her mother in hiding within the forest and begins her plot for bloodthirsty
sweet revenge.
Using real Russian uniforms captured in combat and written
by Yaroslav Voytseshek who is also serving in the armed forces, The Witch.
Revenge opens and repeats a note stating for authenticity the Russian
language will be used in the opening scenes but due to state legislation all
the Russian characters also start speaking Ukrainian. There is also another note stating the film
will be exceptionally violent and gory but that such things shouldn’t be
excluded from ‘the Ukrainian lens’. It’s
an interesting development in Ukrainian cinema to have characters change
languages due to an ongoing war you’re unlikely to see anywhere else. From here, the digital scope-widescreen
effort penned by Kostiantyn Ponomariov with a suitably energized battle-oriented
score by Oleksandr Chorny is mostly an intensifying Grand Guignol episodic
offering of each and every one of the soldiers suffering a ghoulishly grisly
fate worse than death. For anyone
remembered the ‘You’ll never get an erection, starting tomorrow’ viral clip,
well, The Witch. Revenge amply delivers on where you think it
might. Between scenes of limbs hanging
from trees like Christmas ornaments, two rapes including a fake-out that will
raise some eyebrows while others clap and cheer, it is a woodsy mid-budget practical
effects driven kid cousin to Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers except we’re
cheering the monsters on here.
An exploitation-horror entertainment functioning as much
needed revenge porn for a country still under attack, The Witch. Revenge is
a mostly well-acted ensemble piece with strong visual effects by Postmodern
Production while a military photographer handled the occult as well as modern
costume design. One of a handful of movies
being made about the war though functioning as escapism and doing as much graphic
screen violence to the adversary as possible, much of the heavy lifting goes to
the female cast members from actress and TV presenter Tetiana Ozhelevska as the
titular Konotop Witch who has to portray grief turned towards increasingly
inhuman rage to Pamfir actress Olena Khokhlatkina as Aunt Yevdokia who
tries failingly to talk her thoroughly enraged niece from going on a murder
spree. The rest of the cast of Ukrainian
actors playing Russian soldiers range from going mad to exposing their weaknesses before becoming cannon fodder for the Konotop Witch.
Opening two days before Independence Day of Ukraine, The
Witch. Revenge shot up to number 10 at the Ukrainian box office amassing ₴57.4
million in ticket sales after fourteen weeks in theaters and further shot up
into the top three most commercially successful Ukrainian horror films of all
time. Later still, a board game inspired
by the film entitled The Konotop Witch was released in 2024. Among the boldest screen depictions of the
Ukrainian folklore legend, one of the angriest and most seething revenge horror
films maybe in living memory and at times difficult even for the most seasoned
horror fans with unseeable images forever etched into this horror junkie’s
memory banks, The Witch. Revenge outside of the circumstances of its
inception with real-world warfare being incorporated into the narrative is a
pretty mean and mad shocker. Coming
close at times to the level of repulsiveness as Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake,
it won’t be for most horror fans. But
for those interested in Ukrainian cinematic responses to the war, Eastern
European horror, wartime horror and a peer into what every Ukrainian civilian
must be thinking and feeling right now, The Witch. Revenge packs a hard
punch you won’t soon forget.
--Andrew Kotwicki
