War Witch

Komona (Rachel Mwanza) dwells in an indistinct and unnamed sub-Saharan African country; and as writer-director Kim Nguyen’s Oscar-nominated (it lost to Amour) War Witch opens, she is 14 and pregnant, and narrating, to her unborn (and unwanted) child, the story of how she came to be where she is. Two years before, the rebels came to her village, pointed guns at the children and bade them execute their own parents. Those who did so, like Komona, passed some kind of test and were inducted into the rebels’ force; they went to the jungle to fight against the government soldiers.

They give her an intoxicating sap called “magic milk” to drink and Komona begins to see the souls of those who have perished in the ongoing war, who wander the countryside because they have not received a proper burial and therefore cannot move on. Her own parents, whom she was forced to murder at gunpoint, come to warn her about an impending attack. As the sole survivor, Komona is brought before the rebel leader, Grand Tigre Royal (Mizinga Mwinga) who deems her a “War Witch,” a lucky amulet to keep near him in battle.

Komona befriends an older boy, an albino called Magicien (Serge Kanyinda), who is also considered to have mystical powers. Together they run away from the rebels, and take refuge at the home of his kindly uncle Boucher (Ralph Prosper), whose family has suffered things too terrible to mention. Magicien wants to marry her, but to do so she declares that he must bring her a rare white rooster, a family tradition Komona means to maintain.

This interlude from the horror, buoyed by effervescent pop music, is lovely and short-lived, as Grand Tigre Royal dispatches soldiers to track down the charmed couple.

Child soldiers have become a cinematic trope of late, and Western filmmakers always expose themselves to charges of exploitation when they make use of African sorrow for dramatic means. And so War Witch is vulnerable to charges of cultural poaching - Nguyen refrains from naming the country in which this atrocity drama is set, which feels dodgy and a little lazy. Africa is still the Dark Continent in most Western minds, the place of warlords and Joseph Kony, a place where the worst imaginable things can happen.

But despite the familiarity (and possible exhaustion) with the subject matter, the movie is driven by a remarkably natural, unaffected performance by Mwanza. And Nguyen, despite relying a little too heavily on the initial voice-over for exposition, is a confident and sensitive intelligence behind the camera. Heretofore he was little known outside horror and fantasy circles, and his work with that sort of material translates quite well. Here he adeptly balances the monstrous with the magical, employing a documentary style that’s reminiscent of Lee Isaac Chung’s powerful Munyurangabo (2007). As in that film, most of the worst violence occurs off-screen, in the minds of the audience.

War Witch 86

Cast: Rachel Mwanza, Serge Kanyinda, Ralph Prosper, Mizinga Mwinga Director: Kim Nguyen Rating: Not rated Running time: 90 minutes

In French and Lingala, with English subtitles