‘The Love Witch’ Review: Sumptuous Horror Indie Is a Retro Blast

[...] many image-conscious movies today use their visual acumen to knock you back in your seat, but mere seconds into Anna Biller’s candy-colored retro-horror film “The Love Witch,” you realize this movie is an ornate portal with a beckoning, bejeweled finger, and you’re as helpless as one of its titular seducer’s hexed-and-sexed victims.

Biller, a feminist indie filmmaker and genre aficionado filtered through an old-school movie sensualist, has crafted one of the year’s most delectable curiosities, and the term “crafted” is not used lightly: she wrote, produced, and directed, as well as made the costumes, designed the sets, created a few paintings for it, and wrote much of its music.

[...] in her one-of-a-kind sophomore feature, she pulls a mesmerizing star turn from newcomer Samantha Robinson, a heart-faced knockout who combines narcissistic eroticism and wit as Elaine, a love-mad serial killer around whom the ’60s-era Hammer filmmakers would have built whole gothic worlds.

Having disposed of an ex-husband who had the temerity to leave her (he’s shown falling to the floor in flashback shots), Elaine heads up the Pacific coast in her cherry-hued convertible, coquettishly narrating her romantic woes (“they say I’m cured now”), a rear-projection landscape behind her as if she were a fleeing Hitchcock heroine.

Taking up in a small town at a friend’s empty pad (the Tarot-inspired apartment set is spectacular), she sets up a spell-casting nook with ancient books, herbs, and beakers of colored liquids, all the better to kickstart true love in a man with a helpful pinch of hallucinogenic magic.

Elaine conveniently leaves out the hocus-pocus part, which she uses immediately on leering, bearded college professor Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), who can’t believe his good fortune that a raven-haired beauty on a park bench wants to drive off with him for a night of home-cooked steaks, coddling (“Poor, poor baby” being Elaine’s favorite cooing small talk), and unadulterated passion.

Filmed in ravishing 35mm (the best way to see it projected) and unafraid to use blast-from-the-past effects like kaleidoscope lenses and rainbow flares on the edge of the frame, “The Love Witch” is, as realized by Biller and cinematographer M. David Mullen (“Jennifer’s Body”), an eye-popping feast.

Biller has a fertile one, indeed, mixing up the hotly lit, saturated palette of glamour vehicles past — syrupy reds, diaphanous fabrics, winelight — with a nudgingly campy, gestural acting style that allows for just enough emotional range from the actors, while producing the occasional cathartic giggle from moviegoers.

Other moments play like delicious shout-outs to sexy siren cinema: close-ups of Robinson giving sinister double takes that recall Gene Tierney’s creepy faraway looks in “Leave Her to Heaven,” and coven rituals with altars and nudist circles straight out of taste-challenged midnight movies.