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How The Love Witch Satirizes and Indulges the Male Gaze

Anna Biller's 2016 feature The Love Witch reached Australian repertory cinemas years after its festival debut, settling into cult screenings at venues like Melbourne's ACMI and Sydney's Golden Age in Newtown. Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a witch drifting through a Northern California retirement community, dispatching lovers in search of a soul-deep romance. Shot on 35mm in saturated Technicolor pastels, the film looks like an unearthed Hammer horror from 1971, and that surface fidelity is where its argument begins.

The film reached Australian viewers through midnight sessions at Brisbane cult venues, MIFF sidebar screenings, and small distributors championing it to queer film collectives in Adelaide and Perth. Viewers here were primed by decades of feminist film theory, but also wrestling with the messy politics of fantasy that the film deliberately stages.

Elaine's central contradiction drives the film. She lights candles shaped like a vulva and performs elaborate rituals to summon the perfect man. Yet every man she meets becomes disposable once she has him. The film seems to mock the male fantasy of the endlessly available woman, but it also savours the imagery of that availability, lingering on Elaine's red lips and skirts with the hungry camera Biller is supposedly critiquing.

This is why The Love Witch refuses easy praise. It operates on two registers at once: a knowing parody of mid-century melodrama, and a sincere celebration of feminine power through spectacle. Holding those registers together is the question the film hands to its feminist viewers.

A Pastel-Coloured Trap for the Patriarchy

Biller's pastiche is meticulous. She built the costumes herself, replicated the soft lighting of Russ Meyer and Roger Vadim, and sourced props from thrift shops to recreate Bay Area yesteryear. Every surface of the film is a quotation, from Elaine's beehive to the swooping strings that cue each seduction. The film is openly hostile to its era, treating the swinging sixties male as a baby-faced predator, nursed on Playboy and incapable of recognising the woman across from him.

The pastiche works as critique because Biller refuses to let the audience enjoy the fantasy uncritically. The men are foolish, vain, easily manipulated. They speak in the clipped bromides of mid-century masculinity. When they look at Elaine, the camera often returns their gaze with contempt, registering their desire as spiritual blindness.

Elaine's Body as Battleground

Here is where the film's coherence wobbles. Elaine's body is her instrument of power, the conduit through which spells are cast and men undone. The camera clearly loves her, lingering on her stockings, her lashes, the ritual objects she arranges around her bed. The question is whose love the camera is expressing.

Biller has spoken about reclaiming the female image from decades of cinematic objectification. The result is a film in which Elaine is simultaneously the subject of her story and the spectacle the film markets. Some scenes make the camera's attention to her body feel indistinguishable from the male gaze the film claims to dismantle, even as the narrative makes clear that Elaine is using that gaze as a weapon.

The Men Who Disappear Into Her Spell

The men of The Love Witch are a procession of archetypes: the professor, the playboy, the cop, the sensitive guitarist. Each arrives fully formed in his masculine cliché, then evaporates once Elaine has had her fill. They are not characters so much as categories of desire the film lists and discards.

Moment in the Film Reads as Satire Reads as Indulgence
The professor's seduction scene Mocks male entitlement and intellectual vanity Sells the scene on Elaine's body
The cop's confession of conquests Exposes masculine self-regard Invites enjoyment of male boastfulness
The guitarist's earnest courtship Critiques performative sensitivity Sets up a melancholy mood the film won't question
Elaine's final ritual and the lover's death Punishes the fantasy of the perfect man Pictures male suffering with painterly relish

The table gestures at the tension that defines the film. Most scenes can be read both ways, and Biller seems to know this, which is why she never lands on a single register.

When Satire Crosses the Line

There are moments when the satire cannot disguise its appetite. The opening sequence, in which Elaine's first husband dies during a lovemaking ritual, is scored to swelling orchestral strings and shot in soft-focus close-up. The sequence is meant to be absurd, a parody of cinematic death-by-passion. Yet the film takes such evident pleasure in Elaine's ecstatic face, framed against red drapery, that the parody reads as enthusiasm.

The film flirts with the male fantasy it claims to expose. It lingers on bodies in ways drawn from the very tradition it attacks. Whether this is a deliberate provocation or unguarded indulgence is a question the film never answers, and the absence of an answer is what makes it worth arguing about.

Aesthetics as Argument

Biller's design choices are inseparable from her politics. The colour palette pushes past pastiche into something almost campy: every interior soft mauve, every exterior a Californian dream of marigold sun. The handmade quality of the production, from the candles Elaine lights to the titles drawn in liquid eyeliner, insists that the feminine is a craft, not a performance.

The film's argument lands most securely here. It treats the labour of femininity as serious, skilled work, whether casting a love spell or sewing a wedding dress. The men, by contrast, are incurious about craft. They wander through Elaine's carefully composed world without noticing the care that produced it, which is itself the film's quietest indictment of masculinity.

Films and Texts That Sit Beside The Love Witch

There is a rich shelf of companions worth seeking out at Australian revival houses and feminist bookshops.

Watching From the Southern Hemisphere

Australian viewers bring a particular angle to the film. Cult repertory culture here is small but durable, and it tends to be the place where films like The Love Witch find their second life. Melbourne's feminist bookshop on Smith Street has long stocked Biller's monograph, and the film has become a teaching object at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney.

The country's cult cinema revival, from Brisbane rooftop screenings to 35mm prints in regional film societies in Wollongong and Hobart, has kept the film in conversation rather than relegating it to nostalgia. That conversation is what the film deserves: not a final verdict, but an ongoing argument about fantasy, feminism, and the images we let ourselves enjoy.

The Love Witch streams on several Australian platforms and remains a fixture of the country's repertory calendar. SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS subscribers can keep the argument going with pieces like the femcel communities essay, which traces how misogynist fantasies of unavailable women circulate online. The site's archive of feminist film criticism is worth digging into. Subscribe to keep arguing about films like this one, and let the publication know what you think.