movie review the witches

‘The Witches’ Review: Anne Hathaway Gives a Flamboyantly Fun High-Camp Evil Performance in Robert Zemeckis’ Hellzapoppin’ Remake

Transplanted to the American South, a new version of Roald Dahl's witch tale stays on the surface in a buzzy way.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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When it came to dreaming up characters of cheeky grandiosity who were put on earth to act out their fear and loathing of children, Roald Dahl didn’t play. In 1961, his first classic novel, “James and the Giant Peach,” featured the loathsome Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, who tormented James like nightmare Victorian spinsters out of Dickens. The title character of “The Enormous Crocodile” wants nothing more than to chomp down on children. In “Matilda,” Miss Trunchbull is a school headmistress so sadistic she’s like a bullying tyrant out of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” And in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” even that rock star of candy Willy Wonka can’t seem to make up his mind about whether he wants to delight children or unsettle them.

But in “ The Witches ,” Dahl really went all out. The book is a primal fairy tale, part Grimm and part flamboyant kiddie opera, about an orphan vacationing with his grandmother at a majestic hotel, where he has a run-in with a coven of witches. They’re attending a meeting presided over by the Grand High Witch, a preening fascist harpy who possesses a potion that can turn children into mice (which she wastes no time doing). Her signature trait, however, is the deluxe hatred that pours out of her like poison. Did Roald Dahl have some deep-seated personal issue (he spoke of the abusive behavior he experienced at boarding schools), or was he just a storyteller with the courage to create unbridled wackjob kiddie villains? Maybe a little of both.

In the 1990 screen version of “The Witches,” directed by Nicolas Roeg, the Grand High Witch was played by Anjelica Huston in a performance of pure delectable scenery-eating kitsch. She was a comic foil out of Mel Brooks, and also the purest of monsters. Thirty years later, Robert Zemeckis has now directed a version that remains true to the novel (and also builds on the earlier film), and what he brings to it is his fusion of relatability and FX gizmo play. It’s nothing more than a baroque cartoon horror film (it stays right on the surface), but the best parts have a crackpot malevolence that’s hard to resist.

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Anne Hathaway , as the Grand High Witch, has been outfitted with a set of severe nightmare trappings that are sure to frighten little ones: a bald head concealed under a series of wigs that cause her to have a terrible scalp rash; arms that stretch out into groping mangled claws; a long middle toe on an otherwise truncated foot; and, most strikingly, a mouth extended back by scars (just like the Joker’s), which gives her an enlarged smile as creepy as the ones in the 1994 David Lynchian music video for Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”

The triumph of Hathaway’s performance is that she never allows the visual effects to dominate her; she acts from inside them, wearing them like makeup. Speaking in an accent that’s like Boris and Natasha by way of Donald Trump’s wives (“Vut vould you do if dere ver mice running all around dis hotel?”), she gives a seething performance that’s two parts “Mommie Dearest,” two parts Wicked Witch of the West, one part “Alejandro”-era Lady Gaga cranking up all the stops, one part Divine, and two parts meth junkie. It’s a whale of an over-the-top evil diva turn, one you can sit back and revel in just for how she pronounces the word “garlic” (“ goooord -lick!”). She makes Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent look like a wallflower. She’s high-camp funny but also genuinely threatening. All of which is to say that Hathaway acts this flamboyant she-demon with the conviction that only a sensational actor can bring to a throwaway movie.

The rest of “The Witches” is serviceable in a standard hellzapoppin’ way. For a while, it feeds on the audacity of transplanting the story to the American South, where our hero (Jahzir Bruno), an 8-year-old child in Demopolis, Alabama, in 1968 (in the credits he’s referred to simply as “Hero Boy”), loses his parents in a car accident and moves in with his warm, wise, whiskey-swilling Grandma (Octavia Spencer).

She tries to lighten his mood with fried chicken and cornbread and Motown tunes, but once they arrive at the Grand Orleans Imperial Island Hotel, a swank getaway set behind a curtain of magnolia trees along the Gulf of Mexico (her cousin is the executive chef there), the film mostly loses its real-world sense of period. There’s one eye-catching set: the Grand Imperial Ballroom, which looks like the Sistine Chapel by way of “The Shining.” It’s where the witches let their hair down, literally, under the guise of holding a convention of the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And it’s where our hero gets vaporized by a vial of purple potion and turned into a mouse.

So does Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick), a face-stuffing British kid, and Daisy (Kristin Chenoweth), the hero’s pet mouse, who it turns out has already been the victim of this transformation. The three are now CGI rodents scurrying around the ornate ledges and kitchen shelves of the hotel like something out of “Mousehunt” or “Ratatouille.” These scenes are fun in a logistically energized but slightly flavorless way. You could say that “The Witches” doesn’t have much in the way of emotional pull, and that there are too few layers to its battle against evil. Yet Anne Hathaway’s performance provides the film with a sick-joke center of gravity, and Zemeckis, sticking to Dahl’s elemental storyline, stages it all with a prankish flair that leaves you buzzed.

Reviewed online, Oct. 19, 2020. Rated: PG. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: An HBO Max release of a Warner Bros. presentation of an ImageMovers, Necropia, Esperanto Filmoj production. Producers: Robert Zemeckis, Jack Rapke, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Luke Kelly. Executive producers: Jacqueline Levine, Marianne Jenkins, Michael Siegel, Gideon Simeloff, Cate Adams.
• Crew: Director: Robert Zemeckis. Screenplay: Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris. Camera: Don Burgess. Editors: Ryan Chan, Jeremiah O’Driscoll. Music: Alan Silvestri.
• With: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Jahzir Bruno, Codie-Lei Eastick, Stanley Tucci, Chris Rock, Charles Edwards, Morgana Robinson, Eugenia Caruso, Simon Manyonda.

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The Witches Contains the Most Extra Anne Hathaway Performance of All Time

What you need to know about Anne Hathaway’s accent in The Witches is that it cannot be contained by the borders of any one nation — it has been designed to bounce from region to region, often in the space of a single exchange. Sometimes she rolls her r ’s with the exaggerated trill of a Spanish teacher doing a demonstration for a class. Sometimes she curls her vowels in a way that lands somewhere between an actual Scandinavian accent and that of the Swedish Chef. Sometimes she leans zestfully into v sounds for w ’s, à la your classic German-ish “ve have vays of making you talk” stereotype. When her character, the Grand High Witch, informs the hotel manager played by Stanley Tucci that there should be “no gooourrrrrrlick in the soup,” it defies geography entirely. He asks her to repeat the request. She does, after sneering, “Did I stutter?” He arrives, eventually, at an understanding that she is referring to garlic, but has opted to pronounce the word as though it were a whole phrase unto itself.

The Grand High Witch is alleged to have “hatched on frozen tundras of Norway.” You could argue that this delivery is meant to reflect both that and the existence of a being who’s spent her long, evil life traveling around the world giving orders to various covens hidden in plain sight. But that doesn’t do justice to just how many active choices Hathaway puts into each sentence. Hathaway’s taken a lot of needless, unfair criticism for her theater-kid earnestness in the past, but what she’s doing in this new film from Robert Zemeckis is a performance without ever feeling like acting. Hathaway’s Grand High Witch is scary, because she’s been given a Venom-wide maw and claw-tipped limbs that lengthen themselves like that Street Fighter character. But there’s no center to her, no character — she’s nothing more than a collection of big line readings and out-of-the-box digital effects. Zemeckis can’t channel Hathaway’s energy to any end, because the movie he’s made is so curiously aimless. The Witches is a new version of the 1983 Roald Dahl children’s book, which was previously adapted by Nicolas Roeg in 1990, but it isn’t exactly an update.

Instead, it manages to feel like a project that maybe once had something on its mind, but that was then reworked into something more nebulous. Zemeckis wrote the script with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro, who has a lot of experience bringing together historical details and genre elements, but only very occasionally do you sense the touch of either. The story’s been transplanted to Alabama, where its unnamed protagonist (played by Jahzir Bruno, and voiced as a grown-up narrator by Chris Rock) goes to live with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) after his parents are killed in a car crash. But the specificity of the film’s time period — 1968, a moment of huge political action, uprisings, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the passing of the Civil Rights Act — is so incidental to what happens onscreen as to be mystifying. Mostly, it enables Grandma to dance to the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” in an attempt to cheer up her grieving grandchild. Grandma, an embodiment of unwavering love and folk-healer wisdom, does gradually succeed in coaxing the main character out of his mourning, just in time for him to have a run-in at the store with a snake-wielding, kid-loathing witch.

The Witches keeps a lot of lore that Dahl, the old anti-Semite, laid out in his novel. But even as it sends Grandma and grandson fleeing to hide out in a fancy hotel by the water, the boy’s pet mouse in tow, it can’t really figure out the mixture of macabre and cozy that Dahl did so well. The witches, who happen to have booked the same hotel for their get-together (under the name of the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), are grotesque in a way that’s sure to scar some tender young imaginations, with their unnatural grins and sore-ridden scalps. But they’re mere monsters — they never capture the feeling that Dahl did, and that the Roeg version got close to, of being a child who’s only starting to understand that not all adults are trustworthy. As in the book, the main character is discovered by the witches when he hides out in the hotel ballroom, where he’s been playing with his pet. And as in the book, he’s dosed with the potion the witches are scheming to use on all children, one that transforms him into a mouse. But the adventure that follows doesn’t capture the unapologetically dark giddiness of Dahl, even as it keeps to something close to his original ending. It just feels flat, even in its use of the computer-generated animals it relies on. It’s an adaptation without direction or purpose, with an unwieldy but deeply committed performance at its center. Hathaway looks to be having fun, at least. Someone should!

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The Witches (2020) Review

29 Oct 2020

The Witches (2020)

Roald Dahl's classic horror tale, half- Suspiria , half- Ratatouille , would seem tailor-made for Robert Zemeckis ' camera. After all, this is the filmmaker who trapped Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep in a baroque, often hilarious house of horrors in Death Becomes Her , who executive produced Tales From The Crypt , who brought us that traumatic scene involving a cartoon shoe and a barrel of dip in Who Framed Roger Rabbit . The man knows scary. And more to the point, he knows how to make scary fun.

Which is why The Witches registers as a mild disappointment. Kicky and colourful, it ushers in its titular characters with elan, but ultimately is somewhat lacking in the frights department. And while it hits all the lurid beats of Dahl's tale, it fails to add much of its own, aside from transplanting the action from 1980s Bournemouth to 1960s Alabama. The unnamed child hero (played by likeable newcomer Jahzir Kadeem Bruno, plus slightly hokey narration from Chris Rock ) still winds up at a seafront hotel with his grandma ( Octavia Spencer ), only to find themselves in the midst of a scheming coven. There's still a grotesque 'unwigging' set-piece, much rat-like sniffing out of children (“The cleaner the kid, the poopier he smells,” somebody explains), and plenty of four-pawed antics as several characters are turned into mice, prompting Zemeckis to go to town with the CGI.

Whenever Anne Hathaway’s on screen, the film comes to life.

In Nicolas Roeg's 1990 adaptation , Anjelica Huston ruled the roost as the Grand High Witch, formidable in her imperious human form and unforgettably nightmarish in her Jim Henson-enhanced, sausage-nosed true mien. Anne Hathaway's take on the character here is less trauma-forming, but lots of fun: she's equipped with a Garbo-on-steroids accent that gives the word “mice” seven consonants, amped-up haughtiness, and a wardrobe that perfectly straddles the line between chic and infernal. Whenever she’s on screen, the film comes to life. And Zemeckis finds some new, tech-assisted ways to make the GHW scary, such as freakishly elongating arms, all the better for chasing shrunken infants through vents.

Elsewhere, though, it's all a little plodding. It never hits the visceral heights of Roeg's vision, with only flashes of visual brilliance (there's a doozy of a shot of a car in a snowstorm). And while promising elements are wheeled into place — not least Stanley Tucci as the toadying hotel manager — it's never quite as wild and outrageous as it could be. Still, there’s enough zip and zest to make it a fun Halloween treat, and the notion that there are sinister witches among us remains an effectively spooky one. Hint on how to identify them, based on this film: they pronounce garlic “gorlick”.

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Movie Review – The Witches (2020)

October 21, 2020 by Robert Kojder

The Witches , 2020.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Kristin Chenoweth, Jahzir Bruno, Chris Rock, Codie-Lei Eastick, Charles Edwards, Morgana Robinson, Eugenia Caruso, Jonathan Livingstone, Zeke Taylor, and Eurydice El-Etr.

Based on Roald Dahl’s 1983 classic book ‘ The Witches ‘, the story tells the scary, funny, and imaginative tale of a seven-year-old boy who has a run-in with some real-life witches!

When I said Octavia Spencer deserves more major roles, I didn’t mean as a coughing woman that’s either spouting off similes or talking to three horrendously rendered CGI mice. When Robert Zemeckis came up with the idea to make a CGI focused remake of The Witches (also based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl), I’d love to be a fly on the wall to know how the structure turned into the classic story meets an episode of Everybody Hates Chris but with witches. It also remains a mystery what Anne Hathaway is doing with her career recently, seemingly going out of her way to take bad roles, here as the leader of a coven that hilariously looks like Mortal Kombat ‘s Baraka when she stretches her mouth wide open, ghastly special-effects and all incapable of scaring even the intended demographic of younger audiences.

Other questions came to mind while watching The Witches , but the most prevalent thought is simply wondering how a story so magical feels so soulless. The answer obviously lies in the overreliance on CGI, but there’s also the determination to remove just about every element from the book that could be considered even remotely horrifying. There’s an overblown sequence halfway into the movie where Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch (someone was certainly high if they thought these effects were decent) demonstrates her abilities which also includes a magic potion capable of transforming a child into a mouse (they do retain their speaking voice) that drags on and on until you don’t even care what they are about to do. Far too often the movie tries to take scenes that should be quick and effective, blowing them up trying to achieve something on a grander scale that doesn’t work.

Robert Zemeckis is unquestionably an imaginative filmmaker, and to his credit, his mind is most definitely working when it comes to sequences of talking mice frantically making use of their luxurious hotel environment to get around and accomplish things (the floaty cinematography that follows them around is also impressive), but everything here feels like it’s on autopilot and lacking heart. Technically the film is sound and competent, especially when it comes to the extravagant 1960’s period piece costume design and layout of the hotel, but it’s all for naught when the actual computer-generated effects are downright terrible and the story itself can’t engage.

For the most part, Robert Zemeckis is sticking to the source material, with the major change being the family at the center of the film is now Black, which is a great creative choice for diversity and representation. However, outside of maybe one line of dialogue (it seems to imply it’s rare Black people stay in such a fancy hotel), going that route with these characters feels entirely wasted unless you happen to REALLY enjoy Chris Rock narrating stories. A few of the witches are also Black so at least it seems the coven is not racist (as far as we know, anyway).

The general gist of The Witches is that it follows an unnamed boy (he is credited as Hero Boy and played fine enough, given the weak material, by relative newcomer Jahzir Bruno) who tragically loses his parents from a car accident, subsequently taken in by his also unnamed grandmother played by Octavia Spencer (who is usually terrific and consistently capable of making lesser works somewhat watchable with her headstrong demeanor and sassy personality). Naturally, The Witches starts off rather sad, although Robert Zemeckis keeps that mood going for so long it’s questionable if he ever had a handle from the beginning on what this movie should be. There are also parts where it seems like Grandmother is out to scare Hero Boy shitless about witches, which is kind of a mean thing to do to someone still grieving over deceased parents.

Nevertheless, Hero Boy believes he has encountered a witch one day in a store which also startled Grandmother, prompting them to pack up and use connections to her cousin to stay in the aforementioned ritzy hotel. As for the witches, they have the simple and classic motivation of hating children, going as far as planning to take money from the hotel to open up various candy shops selling delicious chocolate bars as bait for their brand-new concoction turning them into mice.

The material is decidedly for kids who might not care much about the poor CGI, but the constant tonal swings probably won’t help. It’s hard to tell if the movie wants you to laugh at it or pretend to be scared. Again, there are clever sequences once the story shifts focus more to the mice and it’s clear that Robert Zemeckis had the most fun designing those set pieces, but it’s all hollow and artificial. There is also a discussion to be had that maybe Roald Dahl adaptations lose their fantastical appeal with CGI that can’t properly convey the wonder of his books ( The BFG was better but not by much). Take nothing away from Robert Zemeckis being of the most talented filmmakers ever, but his last two films ( Welcome to Marwen ) and now The Witches have been disastrous misfires and it’s frustrating watching skilled notable actors take part in this empty display of computer wizardry.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, friend me on Facebook, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , check out my personal non-Flickering Myth affiliated  Patreon , or email me at [email protected]

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‘The Witches’ Review: A D.O.A. Fantasy Made From Dahl Parts

• By David Fear

He’s given us eccentric candy moguls, massive traveling peaches, a dapper fox and his friends, telekinetic moppets, big friendly giants and more — but discerning fans of Roald Dahl’s work tend to have a weakness for his witches. Published in 1982, The Witches was one of Dahl’s darker excursions into kid’s-lit, which is saying something; pitting a seven-year-old boy against a coven of kid-hating hags (disguised as high-society women), it garnered praise and controversy in almost equal numbers. Some called it horribly misogynist. Others consider it the ultimate flipped bird against adulthood, with the author not so subtly suggesting that grown-ups want to figuratively and literally destroy the child-like qualities of youth.

The book has won awards, made countless Best YA Books lists and been banned from libraries. It’s been used as an example of Dahl’s talent for not sugar-coating his Fisher-Price-My-First-Macabre tales for underage readers and for how he was a textbook “problematic author” before the term became part of our everyday lexicon. It’s been adapted into a multi-part radio drama and an opera. No less than Nicolas Roeg, the man behind The Man Who Fell to Earth and other gloriously bizarre ’70s movies, turned this fractured tale into a film in 1990. It’s now considered by many to be a cult classic. Dahl loathed it.

Every generation should get The Witches it deserves, which begs the question: What did this current generation do in order to deserve a dull, D.O.A. interpretation? Writer-director Robert Zemeckis ‘s new stab at Dahl’s delightfully demented novel (it begins streaming tonight on HBO Max), with help from no less than Kenya Barris (!) and Guillermo Del Toro (!!) on the screenplay, makes two highly intriguing decisions very early on. First, it relocates the story from England to Demopolis, Alabama circa 1967. Suddenly, a whole world of subtextual possibilities open up when you drop this story into the George Wallace’s South. It’s also a great excuse to play a lot of Motown and Stax on the soundtrack, and let your costume designer go crazy with the vintage couture. You quickly begin to realize which of these factors may have played a bigger part in the period setting.

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The other is to make the unnamed child an African-American kid. Referred to as “Hero Boy” in the credits, he’s played by the charismatic child actor Jahzir Bruno and voiced, in his older incarnation, by Chris Rock . Taken in by his kindly grandmother ( Octavia Spencer ) after his parents perish in a car accident, the youngster has an encounter with a strange woman at the local grocer. Grandma is deservedly worried; she once saw her best friend get turned into a chicken. Witches prey on the poor, the overlooked, the kids no one makes a fuss about, she says. They have to hide out where it’s safe: “a rich white folks’ hotel,” because no one will think to look for them there. So Grandma, Hero Boy and his new pet mouse, Daisy, check in. How were they to know that this is the same place that the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a.k.a. the Southern-belle coven run by the Norwegian Grand High Witch ( Anne Hathaway ) herself, is scheduled to hold a huge gathering?

That’s how Hero Boy and Daisy find themselves trapped under a stage in the hotel ballroom, as Her Highness — played by Hathaway with an an ever-evolving Scandinavian accent located north of a fondue restaurant’s maître d’ yet south of The Muppets ‘ Swedish Chef — preps her assembled acolytes for their master plan: unleashing a purple elixir that will turn children into mice. There are a few things that characterize witches, you see. They may look like normal, snobby human beings with an unlimited line of credit at Nordstrom’s, but actually they have claws for hands, feet with a single bird-like talon instead of toes, and CGI-enlarged jaws, all the better to chew scenery, my dear. And they hate kids. So imagine the sight of largely (but not exclusively) white horde of well-dressed ladies, pulling a small black boy by his legs into the middle of the floor, and descending on him like ravenous predators. It’s a bit of imagery that feels nightmarish whether it’s in the incendiary late Sixties or reflecting back on our recent summer of rage.

That’s the extent to which that notion goes, however. Maybe you can’t blame Zemeckis and Co. for not milking this scenario for boldfaced commentary, even though they’ve purposefully trod into this fertile ground — they want to make a work of fantastical escapism that merely hints at something potentially deeper, but doesn’t actually bother to spelunk beneath the surface. Fair enough.

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Except The Witches 2020 can’t seem to find a proper manic-to-ghastly rhythm that makes the material work, either, which is a bit more of a dealbreaker. The director and his longtime cinematographer Don Burgess ( Forest Gump, Cast Away, Flight ) zip the camera around, often at mouse level, through scurrying passerbys and around posh rooms, yet everything feels curiously inert. Once Hero Boy is turned into a mouse along with another youngster at the hotel — Daisy, too, is a former human being, and sounds a lot like Kristin Chenoweth — we’re robbed of this actor’s expressiveness and are simply left with digital rodentia. Spencer does her best to keep the humanity intact, while Hathaway overcompensates for the lack of spark elsewhere by going bigger, broader and more googly-eyed batshit than you can imagine. No one is expecting her to step into Angelica Huston’s stilettos, given the bite and brilliance that actor brought to Roeg’s movie 30 years ago. But it’s a performance that’s larger than the movie its in. It’s probably also larger than the TV screen you’re watching it on, the multiplex screen this was originally meant for pre-Covid, and the city block where that multiplex resides.

It all ends with a postcard montage that, even by Hollywood’s happily-ever-after standards, feels cut-rate and totally alien to Dahl’s vision or voice. Zemeckis has made his share of notable movies over the past four decades, from gross-out comedies to serious dramas. Ever since the turn of the century, however — around the time he filmed an airplane crash so harrowing and realistic in Cast Away that it left you suffering from PTSD — his work has begun to feel like it’s more and more concerned with the formal experiments and tech-pushing spectacle over the storytelling. (See: The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, The Walk, Welcome to Marwen. ) Thankfully, The Witches doesn’t devolve into deafening bells and whistles. It just doesn’t really come together in any aspect, sort of limping and flopping to the finish line. This isn’t a disaster. It’s just less of a tribute to the source material then a mild attempt at family-friendly fantasy composed of spare Dahl parts.

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The witches, common sense media reviewers.

Some kids will love it, some may find disturbing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Luke is exceptionally brave.

Scary witches, children in peril, including baby i

Parents need to know that this story has a genuinely twisted flavor that some children will love and others will find disturbing. Luke is exceptionally brave and enjoys being a mouse (in the movie, he is changed back, but in the book, he stays a mouse). Children may be upset not only by the witches, but also by the…

Positive Messages

Positive role models, violence & scariness.

Scary witches, children in peril, including baby in carriage pushed down a hill (and rescued), Luke's parents are killed in an (offscreen) accident, which does not seem to bother him too much.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this story has a genuinely twisted flavor that some children will love and others will find disturbing. Luke is exceptionally brave and enjoys being a mouse (in the movie, he is changed back, but in the book, he stays a mouse). Children may be upset not only by the witches, but also by the death (offscreen) of Luke's parents and his seeming indifference to it. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (10)
• Kids say (23)

Based on 10 parent reviews

They rip there fake faces off

What's the story.

Luke hears about witches from his grandmother (Mai Zetterling). She says they have to wear gloves to hide their claw-like hands and shoes that fit their square feet without toes, and that they are bald and scratch under their wigs. They have a purple gleam in their eyes. They are evil and they steal children, who are never seen again. Luke's parents are killed, and his grandmother takes him to England. When she is diagnosed with mild diabetes, the doctor advises a vacation, so they go to Cornwall. As it happens, a convention of all the witches in England is staying in the same hotel, posing as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Their leader is slinky, black-clad Eva Ernst (Anjelica Huston). Luke overhears her telling the witches to wipe out all the children in England by turning them into mice, and he watches as she demonstrates by giving a potion to a greedy child named Bruno, transforming him into a mouse. The witches find Luke, and after a chase, capture him and turn him into a mouse. With the help of his grandmother, he steals some of the potion, and puts it into the soup to be served to the witches, who are all turned to mice, except for Eva's assistant. Luke manages to get Eva's trunkful of money, along with her notebook listing the addresses of all the witches in America, and he and his grandmother plan to go after them.

Is It Any Good?

This story has a genuinely twisted flavor that some children will love and others will find disturbing. Children may be upset not only by the witches, but by the death (offscreen) of Luke's parents, and by his seeming indifference to it.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the notion of witches. Are you fascinated or disturbed by the idea of these strange women with magical powers?

Why do you think most witches are portrayed as evil?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 24, 1990
• On DVD or streaming : June 22, 1999
• Cast : Anjelica Huston , Jane Horrocks , Rowan Atkinson
• Director : Nicolas Roeg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Family and Kids
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Book Characters
• Run time : 91 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• Last updated : April 26, 2024

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Screen Rant

The witches review: a visually delightful adaptation, but could be more.

Colorful and faithful, The Witches will surely enchant and frighten young viewers, though their parents might wish for more padding within the story.

It's that time of year again: Everyone's looking for the spookiest movies to watch in the lead-up to Halloween. Undoubtedly, there are already countless options available for audiences, whether one is looking for something bone-chillingly terrifying or a bit more subdued. Young streamer HBO Max is ready to supply a brand new entry to the latter category with  The Witches , the newest adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1983 children's novel. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this new iteration of  The Witches remains largely similar to the source material (save for a major location change), which means it maintains some pretty dark elements. Colorful and faithful,  The Witches will surely enchant and frighten young viewers, though their parents might wish for more padding within the story.

In the biggest alteration from Dahl's novel,  The Witches is set in 1960s Alabama. Our young unnamed protagonist (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno) is sent to live with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) after a car accident kills his parents. The Boy takes to life with his grandmother fairly well, but an interaction with a mysterious woman at the store opens the Boy's eyes to the existence of witches. The Grandmother whisks the Boy away to a seaside hotel to escape the witches, but this move proves to be a mistake when they arrive at the same time as the yearly witch conference hosted by the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway). The witches' goal: To turn every child in the world into a mouse so others will exterminate them. It isn't long before the Boy and his new friend Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick) get caught up in the witches' nefarious plan.

Related:  The Witches Cast Explains How To Identify A Witch

When it comes to a film called  The Witches , one expects a lot of the titular characters. Those who have read Dahl's novel (or have seen the 1990 film) will know these witches have some very specific physical attributes, and the film does not shy away from them, making for plenty of memorable visuals. Striking a particular cord is the way Hathaway's Grand High Witch has a smile that stretches far wider than any smile should; it calls to mind  IT 's Pennywise in a rather unsettling way. Less effective, however, is Hathaway's accent; it's hard to pin down exactly what it's supposed to be, and at times, it can even be unintelligible.

Credit where credit is due, though: Hathaway truly commits to the campiness of the Grand High Witch. Whether it's by shouting toward the rafters or dropping down to a menacing murmur, Hathaway gives a larger than life performance that's easily the most entertaining part of  The Witches.  Kids may very well find themselves cowering in fright when she's at her most intimidating, though the effect is certainly helped by her unnerving appearance. Beyond Hathaway, the always-excellent Spencer makes for a grandmother that's both kindhearted and unflinching in the face of absolute evil, and Chris Rock is an effective narrator who could've been used a bit more. The two child performers, Bruno and Eastick, are both charming and adorable, though poor Eastick is too often saddled with jokes about his appetite and body shape.

The Witches  is a faithful adaptation, and that is its biggest shortcoming. By sticking very closely to the original plot, Zemeckis (along with his impressive co-writers Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris) has crafted a film that's rather light. The Boy, his grandmother, and his friends face few obstacles, save for the very real plight of being turned into a mouse. As a result, once the Grand High Witch and her full coven enter the picture,  The Witches flies by. For children with short attention spans, this works in its favor, but seeing as this is already the second feature film adaptation of  The Witches,  the movie may have benefitted if a bit more plot was added in.

The Witches is certainly bolstered by its performances and visuals (which is to be expected of a Zemeckis production), and while its speedy story will win over young audiences, it could've reached new heights had Zemeckis, del Toro, and Barris dared to add a bit more padding. Even the biggest change - setting it in Alabama in the 60s - doesn't do much to affect the overall story.  The Witches can charm fans of the source material, but it ultimately doesn't offer anything new.

More: The Witches Movie Trailer

The Witches   begins streaming on HBO Max Thursday, October 22. It is 104 minutes long and rated PG for scary images/moments, languages and thematic elements.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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The witches.

Review: Anne Hathaway is a hoot, but this remake of ‘The Witches’ is an awfully thin brew

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The last time Anne Hathaway opened her mouth as freakishly wide onscreen as she does in “The Witches,” she was unleashing a torrent of song and preparing for a date with Oscar in “Les Misérables.” In that movie, she played a downtrodden saint with Joan of Arc hair; in this one, she’s gone fully bald and fully evil as the Grand High Witch, a child-stomping demon-sorceress who shrieks and snarls in an accent somewhere between Greta Garbo and Natasha Fatale. She makes a ridiculous yet undeniably memorable monster, with the help of an ear-to-ear Glasgow smile that might remind you of the Joker or Ichi the Killer, at least until she opens up a sharp-toothed maw apparently on loan from Tom Hardy in “Venom.”

Hathaway isn’t the first actor to take on the role; that would be Anjelica Huston in Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of the classic Roald Dahl novel. The feverish brilliance of that movie had something to do with its shivery low-key realism, achieved with little more than canted camera angles, Jim Henson puppets and billows of green smoke. Mostly it was due to the spectacularly vampy Huston: Pouring haughty imperiousness and murderous glee into a bosom-heaving black dress, she gave a hoot of a star turn that also happened to be one of her most fully realized performances. Never condescending to the material or using overt comedy to blunt its spell, she slipped into Dahl’s unsettling, boldly preposterous story as if it were the most plausible thing in the world.

Hathaway is clearly aiming for a similar peak of lip-smacking, vowel-butchering serio-comic villainy here. If she can’t touch Huston in the role — and truth be told, I doubt anyone could — it isn’t for lack of trying in a movie that consistently strains for effect. Creaky, diverting and resignedly inferior, this latest adaptation of “The Witches,” directed by Robert Zemeckis (who co-wrote the script with Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro), tries to refresh Dahl’s story by moving it from Norway and England to 1967 Alabama. The tale is of course endlessly transplantable, because it posits that in just about every town and country in the world, witches are a very real and very dangerous threat.

Leading seemingly ordinary lives yet possessing extraordinary magical powers, they devote every waking, scheming minute to ridding the world of children, whom they regard with visceral disgust. And as in Dahl’s novel, they have disquieting physical characteristics that they take great pains to conceal: sharp claws, toeless feet, enlarged nostrils that help them sniff out children (who reek of dog poop, naturally) and bald heads that they cover with hats and wigs. The story’s unnamed boy protagonist (played by Jahzir Bruno) learns all this from his grandmother (Octavia Spencer), who has become his guardian following his parents’ untimely deaths. An amateur healer and numerologist, Grandmother has a particular expertise in witches, having narrowly escaped being squelched by one herself as a young girl.

A flashback to that long-ago encounter, set in a small, impoverished Black community in the segregated South, provides a glimpse of the more interesting, politically subversive movie “The Witches” sometimes gestures at becoming. It’s both refreshing and pointed to see two Black actors cast as the movie’s heroic duo, and Spencer, though a bit young for her role, taps into her natural reserves of warmth, wit and steel. She makes this grandmother a steadying force, whether she’s using her own personal remedies (a little Four Tops, a little cornbread) to console her grieving grandson or spiriting him off to a hotel by the sea when a witch (Josette Simon) rears her head in their neighborhood.

That hotel is staffed by Black employees who attend to a conspicuously wealthy white clientele, one of several stabs at racial subtext that ultimately feel vague and underdeveloped here. At one point Grandma notes that “witches only prey on the poor, the overlooked,” an intriguing idea that flies in the face of the movie’s own narrative logic.

By a stroke of supremely bad luck, the Grand High Witch and her local Alabama minions, passing themselves off as a children’s charity, have descended on the same hotel for their annual witch confab (regrettably, no one calls it a coven-tion). And when the boy gets accidentally trapped in the ballroom where they hold their meeting, he becomes privy to all their horrific trade secrets, including a plot to transform all the children in the world — not just the poor, overlooked ones — into mice.

The boy is soon discovered and “mouse-ified” himself, a process that occasions one of the picture’s showier, uglier visual effects, his human skin erupting in purple rodent pustules. It made me wonder what this long-gestating remake might have looked like in its originally intended form, as a stop-motion animation that del Toro once planned to direct. Whatever the case, in Zemeckis’ hands it has become something markedly different, inching into gaudy Tim Burton territory; like that equally erratic Hollywood fantasist, Zemeckis has trouble getting a handle on the story’s diabolically tricky tone and a tendency to pour on the grotesque visual flourishes in lieu of real vision or meaning.

“The Witches” is hardly his worst offender in this regard: It’s a model of restraint next to past motion-capture misfires like “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf,” to say nothing of 2018’s dreadful (and dreadfully fascinating) “Welcome to Marwen.” The cute, cartoonish-looking CGI mice aside, most of the effects are lavished on Hathaway: In addition to her alarmingly stretchy jaws, she sports three-fingered hands, extendable arms and a single pointy, wiggly toe on each foot, so that with every shoeless step she appears to be flipping the camera the bird. Hathaway sinks her digital fangs into the role with visible relish: She levitates like Linda Blair , hisses like H.R. Giger’s Alien and dons more crazy blond wigs than Moira Rose . And she takes particular delight in dressing down the obsequious hotel manager — who, being played by Stanley Tucci, briefly calls to mind an alternate-dimension “The Devil Wears Prada” sequel in which a resurgent, homicidal Hathaway has effectively vaporized Meryl Streep.

Speaking of Streep: For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty (including vocal turns by Chris Rock and Kristin Chenoweth, who’s a long way from “Wicked”), “The Witches” is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients. Once again it gives us a gluttonous boy sidekick named Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick), a mice-in-the-kitchen plot that now plays like leftover “Ratatouille” and a clever comeuppance for all those witches, even if most of them seem like dull, dead-eyed automatons rather than a child’s worst nightmare.

‘The Witches’

Rated: PG, for scary images/moments, language and thematic elements Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes Playing: Available Oct. 22 on HBO Max

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"The Witch," a period drama/horror film by first-time writer/director Robert Eggers , tellingly advertises itself as "a New England folktale" instead of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are, at heart, parables that prescribe moral values. "The Witch," a feminist narrative that focuses on an American colonial family as they undergo what seems to be an otherworldly curse, is more like a sermon. Sermons pose questions that use pointedly allegorical symbols to make us reconsider our lives, just as one character uses the Book of Job to understand her role in her family (more on Job shortly). But "The Witch" is not a morality play in a traditional sense. It's an ensemble drama about a faithless family on the verge of self-destruction. And it is about women, and the patriarchal stresses that lead to their disenfranchisement.

For a while, it is unclear which character is exactly the focus of "The Witch." It's probably not grieving mother Katherine ( Kate Dickie ), though Eggers gives ample consideration to her mourning of infant son Samuel, who has disappeared under unusual circumstances. And it's definitely not Katherine's mischievous young twins Jonas and Mercy ( Lucas Dawson and Ellie Grainger , respectively), though Mercy does often speak for her and her brother's inability to understand how the world works after their family is banished to a foreboding forest by a nearby colony. The film's main protagonist might be William ( Ralph Ineson ), Katherine's troubled husband. Or it could be her eldest son Caleb ( Harvey Scrimshaw ), a young man desperate to defend his father from his mother's frustration. 

But more often than not, "The Witch" concerns Thomasin ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), the eldest of Katherine and William's five children. Thomasin undergoes puberty under the mistrustful eyes of her family, but realistically, they're not too concerned with her when crops are failing, money is scarce, and Samuel is missing. Still, Thomasin absorbs the brunt of her family's anxieties: her younger siblings look to her for comfort, but she balks at the added pressure, especially after her mother makes her do more chores than the rest of her family members. There are other subplots in "The Witch," but all roads eventually lead to Thomasin. That's the dark beauty of Eggers's expansive story: it's not just about the marginalized presence of women in a male-dominated microcosm, but the harsh conditions that can, even under extremely isolated circumstances, lead women to resentment, and crippling self-doubt.

"The Witch" is, in that sense, an anti-parable. Eggers eventually leads Thomasin out of the woods, but he takes his time in clearing her path. The result sometimes feels like an imaginary Harold Pinter-scripted version of " The Crucible ," since it follows desperate, lonely souls who do everything—set animal traps, milk goats, till the fields, do laundry—to avoid thinking about what's really troubling them. It takes a while for Thomasin's clan to even consider that their problems are caused by witch, or demonic enchantment. But it eventually happens. Before that, there are only signs and portents, particularly evil-looking animals: a tetchy goat, a twitchy hare, and some talkative crows. Eventually, Thomasin's family personify their fears of nature, a gnawing uncertainty that is predictably gendered as feminine. And suddenly, the family's day-to-day troubles—almost all of which stem from the fact that their land seems cursed—takes the form of a fairy tale witch.

Which brings us back to Job. In the Book of Job, God hurts Job in order to test his faith. The reader knows that God exists, and has a divine, or perhaps just Mysterious, reason for trying Job. But until Job's body is plagued by God, he doesn't question that there is a reason for his torment. The same is basically true of William and his family. Until events lead his family to start clawing at each other's throats, he goes about his business as best he can. As a result, when you watch "The Witch," you often don't seem to know what the film is about. But the film's title is a big clue: this is a fantasy about empowerment, albeit through unorthodox methods. 

I've talked a lot about what "The Witch" is about without mentioning how well it's about it. That's partly because the film is so consistently engrossing that I surrendered to it early on. Eggers' hyper-mannered camerawork draws you in by evoking Johannes Vermeer's portraits and the landscape paintings of Andrew Wyeth (there's also an overt reference to one of Francisco Goya's more famous paintings, but I can't tell you which one for fear of ruining a surprise). The complex sound design and controlled editing also help establish a mood that is (paradoxically) both inviting and somber. "The Witch" draws you in so well that you won't realize its creators have been broadcasting exactly where they're taking you. 

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film Credits

The Witch (2016)

Rated R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin

Ralph Ineson as William

Kate Dickie as Katherine

Harvey Scrimshaw as Caleb

Ellie Grainger as Mercy

Lucas Dawson as Jonas

• Robert Eggers
• Louise Ford

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• Mark Korven

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The Witches review – Roald Dahl reboot fails to cast the original's magic spell

Robert Zemeckis’s retelling of the wicked children’s story feels more grumpy than scary, while its comedy veers between frantic and strained

W ho did Roald Dahl hate more: grownups or children? Kingsley Amis says that Dahl once told him to try writing for children and when Amis said his heart wouldn’t be in it, Dahl replied: “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.” The issue of Dahl’s attitude towards his readership is revived once again with director Robert Zemeckis’s “reimagining” of Dahl’s story The Witches, first published in 1983 and filmed by Nicolas Roeg in 1990 with Anjelica Huston as the incognito Grand High Witch who convenes a sinister children’s charity event in a hotel ballroom.

Now Zemeckis has collaborated with Guillermo Del Toro and Kenya Barris on the screenplay for another version, absorbing some of the earlier film, although why exactly this process has to have the grand label of “reimagining” isn’t clear. Apart from a few shifts in period and location, and narrative tweaks bringing it slightly closer to the book than Roeg, it’s a pretty conventional adaptation. (The boldest reimagining of Dahl was surely Wes Anderson’s animated version of Fantastic Mr Fox .)

We are now in late-60s America, and a little kid called Charlie (played by Jahzir Bruno) is orphaned when his mum and dad are killed in a car crash: he was wearing his seat belt and they weren’t – although evidently that lesson is unlearned, judging by a car journey later in the action. His grandma, played with an easy charm by Octavia Spencer that rescues the film a bit, now has to look after him, and she takes the boy to her house in Atlanta. But while they are out grocery shopping one day, a creepy green-clad witch ( Josette Simon ) sidles up to Charlie with a proffered sweet in the quasi-paedophile manner that signals witchy horror, and the grandma realises that with witches about, they must remove themselves to a place of safety. This turns out to be a very fancy seaside hotel with an oleaginous manager, Mr Stringer, played by Stanley Tucci . But it is at this very place that all the witches are going to convene, disguised as grand society ladies hosting a charity event for the prevention of cruelty to children, led by the awful Grand High Witch.

She is played by Anne Hathaway , doing a comedy accent that at first sounds eastern European or Russian but later becomes more obviously Scandinavian or Norwegian, closer to the story’s origins. She has freaky Joker-style scars at the corners of her mouth that open out at moments of stress into CGI-style horror. Like all witches, she hates children and is on a never-ending mission to turn them into mice, using a secret potion which she can put into these kids’ beloved chocolate.

Our young hero befriends a plump young English boy, a roly-poly fellow called Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick) in Bunteresque tailoring who appears to be imported from the original Dahl British milieu, and they both face an awful transformation. Yet the weird thing is that Charlie happens also to own a mouse, and after a while the secret behind this pet mouse’s identity seems reasonably clear, relating to a flashback incident from the grandma’s own childhood – and yet the film doesn’t spell it out. Are we waiting for a sequel?

The problem is that Hathaway’s Cruella De Vil character comedy turn is pretty strained, certainly in comparison to Spencer’s gentleness and calm. There is one nice line in the script, a gag about Charlie’s reluctance to talk with his mouth full in front of his disciplinarian father, and I quite enjoyed the strange echoes of Tom and Jerry and Stuart Little . But for me there is something very broad and slightly frantic about the comedy here, in a movie whose plush interiors always look as if they have been created with greenscreen, even if they haven’t. The transformations and flights of fancy are strident and startling in their way, and yet don’t feel like liberations of the imagination in the way that I think they are supposed to.

In the end there is a strange nihilist grumpiness in The Witches: not so much the charge of misogyny that is sometimes levelled against this tale, but the sense that (with the exception of the grandmother) the grownups are useless or malign and the children themselves perhaps have more purpose to their lives once they are transformed into mice. The spell does not get cast.

• Anne Hathaway
• Octavia Spencer
• Film adaptations
• Family films
• Robert Zemeckis

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Review: In ‘The Witch,’ a Family’s Contract With God Is Tested

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By Manohla Dargis

• Feb. 18, 2016

A finely calibrated shiver of a movie, “The Witch” opens on a scene of religious wrath. On a New England plantation, around 1630, a true believer, William (Ralph Ineson), and his family are facing a grim assemblage. The setting is a kind of meeting house crowded with men, women and children, a congregation whose silence and unsmiling faces imply disapproval or perhaps fear. Whether they’re standing in judgment doesn’t matter to William, whose arrogant faith in his own notion of Christianity is as deep and darkly unsettling as his sepulchral voice. It’s the sort of soul-and-earth-quaking voice you can imagine one of the biblical patriarchs having, the kind that Abraham used on God and Isaac alike.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘The Witch’

Robert eggers narrates a sequence from his film..

Written and directed by Robert Eggers, “The Witch ” takes place in an America that in its extremes feels more familiar than its period drag might suggest. It’s set a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth and tracks William’s family as it leaves the plantation to settle down alone at the edge of a forest. There, the family members build a farm, grow corn and commit themselves to God, a contract tested by a series of calamities that turn this story of belief into a freak-out of doubt. As the wind stirs the trees and the children taunt one another with talk of witches, you may remember that the movie’s subtitle is “A New-England Folktale.” Something wicked this way comes?

Mr. Eggers knows how to dress a room beautifully and establish a mood quickly. He has a background working on sets and costumes across the arts (his credits include “Sesame Street” and the theater group La MaMa), and the world he and his team conjure in “The Witch” is meticulous and immersive. From the start, with antiqued detail, naturalistic lighting and tightly packed bodies, he signals the claustrophobia of the plantation, where religious fanaticism meets groupthink. Within minutes William’s family is on its lonely road, an exodus that — underlined by the image of the colony gates closing — instills a tremor of anxiety. With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.

At first, these creatures skitter around the edge of the story, their baaing and barking creating a homey cacophony with the giddy squeals of the family’s children. From afar the farm looks as pretty as a needlepoint sampler, with its belching chimney, stacks of corn and quaintly dressed figures. Closer up, though, the scene appears harder, tougher, and so do William and his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), a pair of Grant Wood prototypes. Their pinched and planed faces make a graphic contrast with that of their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose peaches-and-cream complexion looks too insinuatingly succulent for a world of such punitive austerity. Even when their corn blackens — William and Katherine prove to be terrible farmers — Thomasin remains in bloom.

Movie Review: ‘The Witch’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “the witch.”.

The story of the New England Puritans is itself a folk tale that’s been told, retold and fought over through generations of Thanksgiving school pageants, endless productions of “The Crucible” and historical revisionism. Mr. Eggers has looked elsewhere for inspiration, including period accounts like those of Cotton Mather , the Boston minister who influenced the lethal 1692 Salem Witch Trials that Arthur Miller turned into McCarthy-era theater. It wouldn’t be surprising if Mr. Eggers was also familiar with “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s 2009 film about God and patriarchy, authority and domination in Germany before World War I. There are gods and fathers in “The Witch” as well, even if this movie finally settles into a specifically American story about a catastrophe of faith.

Good horror movies make fright palpable, which Mr. Eggers does with dependably spooky stuff like abrupt edits that fall as heavily as William’s ax and shifts in sound levels that fill silences with a choral caterwauling. But Mr. Eggers’s sharpest decision, what makes you and the movie jump, is that he stays inside the characters’ worlds and heads, all disastrously close quarters. These are people who fervently believe both in the Devil and in God, and for whom witches are as real as trees; it’s no wonder that their inability to tame the New World blurs with their fears. The finale is a trip, but Mr. Eggers suggests that when crops and sanity each fail it misses the point to ask if the Devil exists. Of course he does — just read Cotton Mather or talk to the scene-stealing goat called Black Phillip.

“The Witch” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for toil and trouble. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

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As thought-provoking as it is visually compelling, The Witch delivers a deeply unsettling exercise in slow-building horror that suggests great things for debuting writer-director Robert Eggers.

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‘Dead Boy Detectives’ Cast and Character Guide: Who Stars in ‘The Sandman’ Spin-Off?

If Mystery Inc. is busy, put these young sleuths on your speed dial.

From the world of The Sandman comes a supernatural teen series unlike any other. Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives , based on the DC Comics characters created by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner , revolves around two teenage ghosts, who decide to spend their afterlife solving mystical mysteries and crimes of magic. Originally planned as a Doom Patrol spinoff, the show is now set in the same universe as Netflix’s acclaimed The Sandman series, which in turn adapts Gaiman’s landmark graphic novel series of the same name that originally introduced these characters. Unlike the parent show, Dead Boy Detectives is expected to have a lighter tone with more humor and zanier characters, including witches, demons, and a Cat King (more on that later), while also exploring the world of the dead and the alive, side by side.

Dead Boy Detectives is developed by Steve Yockey and is set to star a large cast featuring familiar faces and fresh young talent. Considering the popularity of both the parent show and the source material, there’s a lot of anticipation building up to the series premiere on Netflix. So, without further ado, read on to find out who plays who in Dead Boy Detectives and how Yockey is updating and adapting Neil Gaiman’s beloved characters for their live-action debut.

George Rexstrew

Edwin payne.

Played by newcomer George Rexstrew , who is making his television debut with Dead Boy Detectives , Edwin Payne is a ghost from 1916. In the comics, he was a student at a boarding school for boys where a group of bullies sacrificed him in a satanic ritual. Taken by a demon, Edwin endured decades of torture before meeting Charles Rowland and escaping eternal damnation. Together, Charles and Edwin choose to remain among the living, solving crimes and enjoying their new lease on death to the fullest. Edwin is the more bookish and shier one of the two, and his extensive library of occult knowledge is a very useful tool in their arsenal. In the comics, Edwin is generally cautious about new people (which is understandable considering the extreme trauma he’s been through), but he’s ultimately a friendly and kind person.

Jayden Revri

Charles rowland.

Like Edwin, Charles Rowland is also the ghost of a boy who was killed by bullies, at the same school in fact. In The Sandman comics, Charles died in 1990 and became friends with Edwin during a time when the afterlife was going through a bit of a management crisis, with dead souls returning en masse to the land of the living. At the resolution of the crisis, Charles chooses to stay with Edwin rather than move on to the afterlife, and the two have been inseparable ever since. While Edwin can be shy and reserved, Charles is friendly, enthusiastic, and more hands-on, facing down the more dangerous aspects of their ghostly lives with a magical cricket bat and a seemingly bottomless bag of tricks. In the show, Charles Rowland is played by English actor Jayden Revri , whose previous credits include a major role in the British series The Lodge and the role of the Mind Fairy in Netflix’s Winx Club adaptation, Fate: The Winx Saga .

Kassius Nelson

Crystal palace.

One of the more original characters in Dead Boy Detectives , Crystal Palace is only loosely based on the comic book character of the same name. In the Netflix show, Crystal is a psychic medium who becomes an ally of our ghostly heroes. After Edwin and Charles save her from demonic possession, Crystal finds that many of her core memories have been stolen. So, in an effort to find out who she really is, she joins the Dead Boy Detective Agency and uses her powers to help others. Crystal Palace is played by Kassius Nelson , who has previously appeared in the British soap opera Hollyoaks , the Edgar Wright film Last Night in Soho , and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events .

Yuyu Kitamura

Niko sasaki.

Niko Sasaki is a Japanese high school student who moved to Port Townsend, Washington, after her father’s death. While there, she becomes afflicted with supernatural parasites and drops out of school. As a result of this experience, Niko gains the ability to see ghosts. She soon becomes another living ally of the Dead Boy Detectives, using investigation skills she learned from watching Scooby-Doo and reading manga to help them solve cases. She also bonds with Crystal and the two of them get a place together. This is Japanese actor Yuyu Kitamura ’s first major role.

Briana Cuoco

Jenny the butcher.

Crystal and Niko’s landlord, Jenny Green aka Jenny the Butcher is the owner of the Tongue & Tail butcher shop. Punky and cool, Jenny forms a connection with Crystal and generally turns a blind eye to the weird things that come with her tenants’ association with the Dead Boy Detectives. However, she has her own secrets, both professional and personal, that she will fiercely protect even from them. Briana Cuoco plays Jenny in the series. An actress, singer, and choreographer, Cuoco was a contestant on The Voice Season 5. She is the voice of Batgirl in Harley Quinn and had a recurring role on HBO’s The Flight Attendant , both of which also star her sister, The Big Bang Theory actor Kaley Cuoco .

Ruth Connell

Night nurse.

First introduced in Doom Patrol as a demonic entity, Dead Boy Detectives reimagines the Night Nurse as a supernatural bureaucrat who works for Death, finding lost children and making sure they’re sent to appropriate afterlives. A caseworker for the dead, if you will. The Night Nurse is something of an antagonist in this story because she’s after Edwin and Charles. However, she’s not exactly evil; just an overworked functionary who takes her job very seriously. Scottish actor Ruth Connell plays Night Nurse in the show and previously played the same character in her Doom Patrol appearance. Connell is also popularly known for her recurring role as the witch Rowena in The CW’s Supernatural , a role she reprised in the show’s 2023 prequel spin-off, The Winchesters .

Another antagonist with a bone to pick with the Dead Boys, Esther Finch is a powerful witch who made a deal with Lilith for eternal life. Unfortunately for her, the deal did not include maintaining her good looks, but she finds a work-around using dark and chilling methods. The Dead Boy Detectives get on the witch’s bad side after they save a potential victim from Esther and her giant pet snake. To take them down, Esther sends her crow-familiar Monty to gain their confidence in the form of a handsome boy. Esther Finch is played by Jenn Lyon , who has previously appeared in Justified , Saint George , and as the main character in the TNT crime dramedy Claws . Her familiar Monty is played by Joshua Colley , whose credits include the animated show Peter Rabbit and Netflix’s 2022 high school comedy Senior Year .

Thomas the Cat King

In the world of Dead Boy Detectives , cats can talk, and they have a King to take their grievances to. Thomas the Cat King is a sassy and suave shapeshifter with nine lives, as you can see in the latest clip. As his title implies, the Cat King is a ruler and protector of cats. Our heroes find themselves in trouble with the Cat King after they use magic on one of his cats, which is strictly forbidden. The Cat King is played by Lukas Gage , who is best known for his appearances in The White Lotus Season 1, You Season 4, and the HBO teen drama series Euphoria . Dead Boy Detectives marks the third project of 2024 for Gage, after Fargo Season 5 and Road House , and will be next seen in the sequel of the horror movie, Smile .

David Iacono

David the demon.

David the Demon is, well, a demon. He’s Crystal’s ex-boyfriend who possessed her and stole her memories after being exorcized by Edwin and Charles. Though he no longer has the ability to control her, Crystal is still haunted by David, who hopes that she’ll let him possess her again. David the Demon is played by David Iacono . Like Briana Cuoco, Iacono has also previously had a recurring role in The Flight Attendant . His other previous credits include the Prime Video YA series The Summer I Turned Pretty and the Netflix teen drama Grand Army .

Kirby Howell-Baptiste

Kirby Howell-Baptiste has been confirmed to be reprising her role as Death of the Endless in Dead Boy Detectives , though it hasn’t been announced whether she will be appearing in a one-off cameo or a recurring role. Either way, the character is quite important to Edwin and Charles’s story. First appearing in The Sandman , Death is the personification of the abstract concept of death. Like her brother Dream (aka the Sandman), Death is a cosmic constant, an immortal being that’s more powerful than the gods. Of all her siblings, Death is the one with the most humanity, and she tries to bring comfort and kindness to the souls in her charge. Besides her popular role as Death in The Sandman , Kirby Howell-Baptiste is also known for her appearances in Killing Eve , Barry , and The Good Place .

Other Supporting Cast

Apart from these stars, Dead Boy Detectives also features Lindsey Gort ( All Rise ) as Maxine, Caitlin Reilly ( High School Musical: The Musical: The Series ) as Lily, and Max Jenkins ( The Mysteries of Laura ) as Kingham. Additionally, Michael Beach ( Aquaman ) appears as magic shop owner Tragic Mick, a character from the Dead Boy Detectives comics who is a walrus who was cursed to take the form of a man and desperately longs to return to the sea.

Dead Boy Detectives arrives on Netflix on April 25, 2024.

Dead Boy Detectives

A duo of phantom sleuths roam the boundary between the living and the dead, investigating eerie mysteries that elude the grasp of conventional detectives. Alongside a living accomplice with psychic abilities, they navigate a series of spooky adventures, learning about life and each other.

Watch on Netflix