Season of The Witch (2011 Film) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 10% based on reviews from 109 critics and reports a rating average of 3.6 out of 10. It reported the overall consensus, "Slow, cheap-looking, and dull, Season of the Witch fails even as unintentional comedy." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 28 based on 27 reviews.

Associated Press movie critic Christy Lemire called Season of the Witch "a supernatural action thriller that's never actually thrilling". She wrote, "The scenery is drab, the battles are interchangeable, and no one seems particularly interested in being here. At the same time, Dominic Sena ... never flat-out goes for it in a schlocky, B-horror kind of way. What we're left with is just bloated, boring and utterly forgettable." The critic found Cage and Perlman to be poorly utilized and said of the film's progression, "It's a slog from one challenge to the next, with no real tension building, and all the while the alleged witch plays coy about whether she's actually a witch, pouting beneath her bangs, Kristen Stewart-style."

According to the Los Angeles Times, critics said that Cage was the primary reason that "this swords-and-sorcery romp is a collosal waste of time". Andrew Barker of Variety said Season of the Witch was "both overblown and undercooked" and thought the film would have been more fun if it had a sense of humor. He called the film "too inert for midnight-movie schadenfreudists, and not nearly competent enough for even the most forgiving of fantasy fans". Of the film's production value, he said, "Witch's photography, costumes and production design are of good quality; editing, scoring and visual effects are most decidedly not."

Tom Huddleston of Time Out London wrote, "Despite its admirably straight face, Season of the Witch is a silly romp through Pythonesque medieval cliché and knockabout Hammer horror with a dash of cut-price Tolkien chucked in to keep things moving." Huddleston criticized Cage's performance but praised Perlman's. The critic concluded, "'Season of the Witch' is not for everyone: it’s creaky, predictable and frequently idiotic. But for a tipsy Saturday night, this should tick all the right boxes."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir called the film a "Hollywood-by-Hungary" remake with the "B-movie aesthetic" of director Roger Corman. O'Hehir wrote, "Season of the Witch is an unremitting schlockfest, full of blood and filth, bloated, purulent corpses, ghastly one-eyed witches and undead monks. If there were more such Corman-esque thrills and chills, and a whole bunch less ponderous Bergman references, we'd all be better off."