Is this a masterwork? No. Is it a steaming clod of crap? No again. MARK OF THE WITCH aka ANOTHER is best approached from the indie mindset. The fact that several reviewers have labeled or described the movie as a "giallo" is helpful, for it gives me a perspective from which to base my review, one that has particular implications. Giallos, generally speaking, place emphasis on style over narrative coherence, and this film is no exception. There's something about an 18-year old girl learning her birth mother is a witch who wants to take over her body as some sort of renewal ritual. She has lived with her aunt, an ex-nun who seems to have once been a witch herself. Said girl has a number of quasi-psychedelic hallucinations, punctuated by blackouts during which she does horrible things to the people in her life. It all culminates in a showdown between the girl's mother and aunt, with a bleak ending. Breakdowns in logic abound, like why and how a girl who's just turned 18 is allowed to work and dispense drugs at a pharmacy, and why the pharmacy, that appears to be no bigger than a good-sized walk-in closet, has a janitor. It doesn't matter, because details like these take a back seat to stylized visuals,lurid colors, oddball camera angles, weird imagery, and (normally) copious amounts of gore. This film has most of these things to burn (excepting the gore). Leading lady Rojas is strikingly gorgeous: slender and leggy, with huge dark eyes, she reminds me of the sexy European actresses that appeared in many a late 1960s/early 1970s giallo. If you can appreciate the visual style of the movie--which is what I believe the filmmaker was focusing on--then there's much to appreciate.
