Roald Dahl’s The Witches: Will Gompertz reviews the film starring Anne Hathaway ★★★☆☆

Robert Zemeckis’s (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) screen adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 children’s book The Witches is good in many ways, but it is sadly lacking in one important area. There is an almost complete absence of movie magic.

Yes, Anne Hathaway gives a “vunderfully” hammy performance as the Grand High Witch (think, The Joker’s lovechild with Miss Jean Brodie’s, and then add a wildly over-the-top Eastern European baddie accent).

And yes, spells are cast and supernatural potions are drunk.

But for all the snake-seamed dresses and evil sorcery of Hathaway and her nasty pointy-toed crew, the film is more B-minus than bewitching.

Its fundamental fault is evident from the outset when you hear the normally excellent Chris Rock over-egging his role of narrator and consequently losing all sense of Dahl’s darkly comic creation.

He is not to blame.

The problem becomes clearer in following scenes, which reveal this version is not set in Norway and England as in the original book (or America and England as in the 1990 movie). It has been relocated to Chicago and Alabama, where our hero – a recently orphaned eight-year old boy (a lively Jahzir Bruno) – goes to live with his kindly Grandma (played with a homely warmth by Octavia Spencer).

The change of location is fine, the script that facilitates it is not.

This came as more of a surprise to me than anything in the plodding movie, because it was co-written by the multi-talented, Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), who also co-wrote Peter Jackson’s film versions of The Hobbit. He knows how to adapt British literary modern classics. He is immersed in the ideas of otherness. He is an extremely gifted writer.

The Witches should be right slap bang in the middle of his authorial sweet spot.

But he and his co-creators have failed to grasp the essence of Roald Dahl, which is his malevolent sense of humour welded to a master craftsman’s facility with the English language. Dahl chose words like a code-breaker opens a safe; he would listen and listen and listen until precisely the right word clicked, which he would then use at precisely the right time to unlock a reaction from the reader.

If he couldn’t find exactly the right word, he’d make one up – better that than using not quite the right word, which risked undermining a meticulously engineered narrative atmosphere.

Unfortunately, such attention to linguistic detail is not apparent in this film adaptation, which comes 30 years after Nicolas Roeg’s production starring Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch and Rowan Atkinson as the uptight hotel manager (a role played to lesser effect in this version by Stanley Tucci).