Critic Reviews

Feels startlingly real and inherently relevant, a shining, sterling example of cinema at its most powerful and urgent.

War Witch is a remarkably mature portrait that trusts its audience to have their own reactions to its material; it doesn’t yank at the heartstrings so much as expertly strum them.

Blending a surrealist perspective of battle-tinged faith with the harrowing tale of one girl's resilience, the film is a laser-focused fable threatened occasionally by its drifts into character shorthand, but equaled by a wrenching lead performance by Rachel Mwanza that results in one of the finest of the year.

Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.

The powerful things we expect from War Witch are as advertised, but what we don't expect is even better.

Brutality and tenderness are a potent mix in War Witch.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

It does a marvelous job at giving us an impressionistic taste of horrific circumstances without using them to beat us into submission.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.

Nguyen reportedly worked on War Witch for a decade, and it shows in both the immediacy and authenticity of his tale, and the meticulous craft with which it's told.