- Directed by John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
- Written by John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
- Stars Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 26 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csgq6-_nWPU
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was a very interesting take on witch lore, with a young teen coming of age. The cinematography, effets, and acting are all great. It’s a slow burn that makes you figure things out as it goes along.
Synopsis
We start with a bunch of women hanging another in the woods. They pull the rope, and the victim goes up, choking and gagging. Soon, she stops kicking. Then, the twitching and growling starts. One of the women on the ground opens fire, shooting repeatedly, but the victim just gets more agitated. Then the body ignites and launches up into the air like a rocket. Credits roll.
Izzy and her mother are practicing in their two person band called Hellbender, complete with costumes and makeup. We see that they live in a really isolated area out in the country on a big patch of land.. While her mother’s off to the store, Izzy is out in the woods and hears laughing out there. In town, an old man, probably confused, thinks the mother was his grandmother’s nurse many years ago, but she couldn’t be that old. Izzy thnks the laugh in the woods was a ghost.
Mother goes out to the woods later and assembles a talisman with sticks, berries, hair, and blood. That evening, Mother and Izzy eat moss and pine cones for dinner. The next morning, Mother draws that same symbol in blood on the table.
Izzy is out walking, and a strange man wanders in; he’s lost in the woods and wants directions. Mother leads the man further into the woods and uses magic to turn him to dust. It’s clear that Mother doesn’t want Izzy to have any outside influences. Izzy believes she’s sick and contagious, that’s what mother has always told her..
Izzy goes off in the direction the man spoke of and runs into another girl, Amber, who lives on the same mountain. Izzy knows she’s breaking the rules, but she’s homeschooled and never met anyone her own age before. It turns out, this isn’t even her house, she just breaks in from time to time to use the pool. While she’s away, Mother goes into a locked room, touches a book, and gets a weird vision.
Izzy tells her mother that she’d like to play Hellbender in front of a real audience. Mother warns that Izzy can’t be around anyone– ever.
Izzy goes back to the pool house with Amber and a couple of other teens. Izzy plays the drums for them, and they love it. She also drinks her first tequila, along with an earthworm placed inside. She mentions that she’s a strict vegetarian, but eats the worm anyway. She screams in horror after swallowing it. The owners of the house arrive, and everyone runs for the hills.
On the way home, Izzy hears voices in the woods. The owner of the house confronts Izzy, and she looks at him funny…
When Izzy gets home, Mother is not pleased. She explains that she ate a live worm. Izzy says that Amber’s uncle has been missing for two days; he’s the one Mother dusted in the woods.
Izzy goes into Mother’s secret room and finds the book. She also gets a vision. Mother explains that the worm didn’t make Izzy crazy, the worm’s life did. “Try a rat. or a dog. or a deer. It’s all in the pumping of the blood.” “What happens if we eat people?” “Then you’ll know power.” Was that a dream or was that real?
Mother admits that Izzy isn’t really sick. She and her mother split and eat a caterpillar. Then they both do some magic. Izzy spends several days practicing her magic and getting used to it. We see that she goes out at night and does things that she lies about to her mother.
Mother finds bones in the woods; “I’ve been seeing a lot of bones lately, all stripped clean lately,” she says. She doesn’t know what Izzy’s been doing at night.
A ranger comes around asking about the missing man; they suspect a mountain lion. They say they haven’t seen one, and he goes away.
Mother starts to find the magical symbol next to some of the bones in the snow. She starts figuring out something is up with Izzy.
“I love you so much I might eat you up,” Mother says. She then extolls the wonders of eating maggots. Then they get high on life force and puke blood on each other. Mother relates that Izzy’s grandmother once ate an entire village, then sewed her mouth shut out of guilt. She was then hanged. Mother thinks that she’s about 147 years old.
Izzy goes to town and apologizes to Amber. Amber says that the house owner was attacked by a wild animal. Amber is rude, and Izzy doesn’t like that.
Mother finds her secret room unlocked and the book is gone. She immediately knows what Izzy has become. She then finds a really strange living tunnel in the basement and starts crawling. She finds Amber down there, and she’s in pretty bad shape. This is Izzy’s happy place, and Izzy arrives. Mother swears she raised Izzy to be good, not evil. Izzy tells Mother that she’s in denial; she was every bit the monster that Izzy has become. It runs in the family.
Will they make peace? Or just have dinner?
Commentary
The visuals here are excellent. Great cinematography, especially in all the outdoor scenes in the woods and mountains. The performances are good, and although we developed theories early on, we had no idea exactly where it was all going. It’s almost like we get to learn about a race of human-like beings, very powerful, who have lived alongside the human race since the beginning.
It’s a slow burn, and you know it’s not going to end well for someone, but even up to the end, you aren’t sure who’s going to survive all this.