Vildheks

A good family movie, a slow burn to watch on a sleepy night. i wish i could travel by fogways, seemed cool to be able to cross vast distances while stumbling through a bit of fog (just dont get lost).

I really enjoyed this film, I'm way older than its intended audience but the aunt Isa in the film is living my witchy cabin in the forest dream so it drew me in!

The clunky dubbed English version on Amazon does this film no favours and it isn't fair that reviews here are clearly not taking that into consideration. The English dubbing is pretty bad thanks to over zealous voice acting so I quickly switched to subtitles and it was so much better. Even though the only option for subtitles I had was also audio description which was mildly annoying when you don't need to be told there are 'birds cawing' or 'ominous music'.

It's a family film so it does have a simple plot which I'm all for, why over complicate things and make things convoluted? So many big hoohah mainstream Hollywood films would benefit from simplifying and shortening these days. But the direction here was really good. There's a scene that uses CGI that is shown as a reflection in the main character's eye. This is genius! I wish more filmmakers would use CGI cleverly in this way, so it doesn't just look like average clunky CGI effects that will age badly, it was considered and made the most of the special effects, as did some of the other scenes.

I appreciated the sinister but not violent aspect too which is creeping in more for younger viewers, and I loved the message of the wild witches, protecting the wild, the earth etc. Overall I think this is an enjoyable, quirky, wholesome watch with a positive message about embracing your weird and protecting the natural world.

Based on a book series by Lene Kaaberbøl, it is not as flexible as the movie could be if designed for a movie.

Clara (Gerda Lie Kaas) comes of age to find her mother seemed to forget to tell her of her destiny. She gets scratched by a black cat and everything in her life goes wonky. Yep, she is the one, and has to do the things "The One" has to do to save everything that is "Wild."

I must say the real cutie is May Simón Lifschitz; she plays the evil Kimæra.

I watch the one with the English dubbing. Somewhere out there is the original language version. The trailer is in Danish and they only used basic words so I can see that the dubbing is convenience but not necessary.

This could become a series. However, it was wrapped up well.

I've read the book this movie is based on when it came out in Germany and opposed to this movie, it's really good. The plot is different than in the book, like they cut out the exciting parts, what leaves us with the most boring kids movie I've ever seen. It vaguely tells the original story like someone read the book and wrote this movie one year later from pure memory, with the only intention to make this a very good looking movie. I was also absolutely not able to connect with the characters at all. The main actress doesn't look like the girl on the book cover as well. The summery of my review would be: Absolutely boring, but probably great if you want to play it on mute in the background.

The production work on this movie is breathtaking, especially for a Danish-language film. You can tell that someone threw a lot of money at it. The film really looks like a proper fantasy epic. Emphasis on 'looks like' because unfortunately, the writing doesn't come close in terms of quality or attention to detail. The plot is cliché and the dialogue is cringeworthy. It is unbelievable that it took 3 people to write this. Sometimes it flat out doesn't even make any sense and the viewer is left with more questions than answers. They use the word "wild" so many times we joked about taking a shot every time. Anyway, the wild world of wild witches with wild friends has the potential to be interesting but falls dissapointingly flat. The characters are underdeveloped although I think the actors did their best. Perhaps something can be said about three men writing a film targeted to a tween girl audience about a tween witch based on a book by a female author for female audience... Why not bring on a woman to co-write the script? I feel like the film desperately needs it. The relationship between mother and daughter feels disingenuous. The relationship between the two girls Kahla and Clara lacks build-up. The supposed "girl drama" at school lacks logic. Yes, middle school girl drama isn't always rational - especially not to three grown dudes - but really!? I won't spoil specific details, but you will understand what I mean when you see it. I thought the ending was the lamest ending in the history of endings. The scenery was the only wild thing in this film. I only gave it three stars because of the stunning cinematography.