Loretta Devine's cheerfully wicked turn makes "Spell" down-and-dirty hoodoo fun

Spell (2020)

If comparative loglines are helpful, “Spell” is like the Southern Gothic version of “Misery” with hoodoo. Director Mark Tonderai (2012’s “House at the End of the Street”) and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (2015’s “Point Break”) construct a horror story thematically related to classism and privilege, and yet the rich protagonist and the poor antagonist pitted against each other in this backwoods captivity thriller are both African American. While “Spell” has its fair share of frustrations, this is still a satisfyingly creepy battle of wits, and we are all here for Loretta Devine as a cheerfully wicked practitioner in folk magic. 

Having survived an abusive childhood and now making a name for himself, hotshot lawyer Marquis T. Woods (Omari Hardwick) receives the news of his estranged father passing away in rural Appalachia. With his wife Veora (Lorraine Burroughs) and two teenaged kids, Tyson (Kalifa Burton) and Samsara (Hannah Gonera), he plans to return to the homestead for his father’s funeral and to close his financial affairs. Taking Marquis’ private single-engine plane, the family gets caught in a thunderstorm and go down somewhere in Kentucky. Marquis recovers, waking up bed-ridden in the attic sewing room of an old farmhouse. Tending to him is cheery hoodoo practitioner Eloise (Loretta Devine). When she won’t tell him the whereabouts of his family after the accident, Eloise brings in husband Earl (John Beasley) and muscular farmhand son Lewis (Steve Mululu) to force him back into bed and then cast him to sleep with her goofer dust. As Marquis keeps waking up and trying to escape (even though his caretakers keep locking the door behind them), he pieces together the special plans Miss Eloise has for a healthy man like him. 

“Spell” surely has an efficient setup with an attention to detail that would seem extraneous at first. It is established in the first scene that Marquis is resourceful with locksmith skills, which immediately come in handy when his wife locks herself in their bedroom behind a $1500 door. Also, it’s no filler that Marquis’ son reveals his deformed hand to one of the yokels at a gas station. Once Marquis is placed into his Paul Sheldon situation and Miss Eloise presents Marquis a “boogity”—a voodoo doll made up of pinches of hair, blood, and other fluids—it’s a done deal what kind of story this will be. The script does a credible-enough job of rendering Marquis helpless with a few lapses in motivation that should have been flagged by Omari Hardwick to ask, “Would my character do this?” In his first escape attempt out on to the roof of the house to the roof of the barn, Marquis chooses to go back once he’s possibly been found out and crawl back into bed, soaked clothes and all as if Eloise will think he was just having a fever dream. After that, once another escape attempt forces Eloise to put a bolt in his foot, Marquis takes the bolt out to go snoop around and then pushes it back in so Eloise won’t know he was out and about. Why does Marquis bring about this pain on himself ad nauseam? In his fight to survive, Marquis does at least remain resourceful and uses Eloise’s healing tools against her. 

Omari Hardwick (2018's "Sorry to Bother You") makes for a stoic, fine-looking leading man as Marquis, who has worked hard to get away from his scarred past, but Loretta Devine blows goofer dust in Hardwick’s face and hijacks the whole movie. In a similar way Kathy Bates approached Annie Wilkes, Devine chillingly plays friendly, kooky, and no-nonsense with an underlying evil. She believes everything she preaches and reminds Marquis that her tending him is all for his own good. When Marquis offers her all of the money he is worth, Eloise isn’t interested. When he brands her spiritual healing like a bunch of hooey that sounds uncomfortably close to what his own father believed, Eloise could come off easily offended, but she shuts down his uppity city-boy cynicism real quick with, “We don’t have much in the way of Obamacare down here.” In fact, she’s as ruthless as Leatherface.

"Spell" excels as a down-and-dirty entry in the hoodoo-horror sub-genre. Director Mark Tonderai gets suspenseful mileage out of seeing how Marquis will get out of this prisoner situation, while dodging some close calls when creeping around the house on cat's feet. In the film’s most effective sequence, Marquis escapes out of the attic window and into the pouring rain; what he witnesses from the roof of Eloise and Earl’s abattoir barn with a crowd of people, a farm cat, and a goat during the “blood moon” is unnerving. And, if you thought the hobbling scene in “Misery” was a brutally gasp-worthy moment to remember (and yet more restrained in what it actually showed), two gore bits involving a foot leave nothing to the imagination. It gets repetitive, but "Spell” is well-made, intense, and often horrifically unpleasant. 

Grade: B -

Paramount Players is releasing “Spell” (91 min.) on premium video on demand October 30, 2020.