Looking for witchcraft-themed movies that were actually released in the past couple of years,1 I ran across “The School for Good and Evil,” which was released in 2022. So I decided to give it a watch and I have a lot of thoughts about it.
I should warn the readers that this post will be chock full of spoilers. So if you haven’t seen it yet and you dislike spoilers, you might want to run over to Netflix and come back to this post after you’ve watched it.
I also want to take a moment to acknowledge and point out the antisemitism in the movie. Toward then end, when the character Sophie begins to embrace her role as an evil witch, she begins to turn ugly. Both unsurprisingly and unfortunately, the movie-makers decided to portray her transformation as her becoming ugly in the stereotypical manner. And the stereotype of the ugly witch is firmly rooted in antisemitic caricatures of Jews. Similarly, as another reviewer pointed out, both Sophie and Rafal are shown as being the most evil because of their use of blood magic, which is another antisemitic trope often used. (For those not familiar, it’s rooted in blood libel against Jews. While some might be willing to overlook these things — as the movie is drawing primarily from fairy tales and these antisemitic tropes are pretty baked into those tales — I still find it disappointing. It would have been entirely possible to demonstrate Sophie becoming “ugly” without drawing on such stereotypes. And the use of blood magic played no major role in the movie and could have been written out altogether.
At the very least the movie could have interrogated those stereotypes. After all, it challenged many of the other fairy tale ideas, such as when Rafael points out that some of the fairy tale villains are sent to truly cruel fates and proudly declares them a “corruption of the good in the stories.” So before I move on with the many wonderful thoughts and themes I saw (or at least read into) the movie, I wanted to acknowledge these problems and sit with the discomfort that those in charge could and should have done better.
There’s not a lot to say about this movie’s portrayal of witches and witchcraft. There is no sense of witchcraft as a modern day witch like myself sees it in the movie. Instead, this is about fairy tale witches, who are almost always portrayed as evil. And that is how they are treated in this movie. Witches are common villain in the stories the students will participate in and therefore must either be trained to stop them or trained to be one of them.
At this point, a reader might rightfully wonder why I’m covering this movie at all then. I’d say that the main reasons are two-fold:
- I think fairy tales and story telling in general are important to witchcraft, or at least the witchcraft I practice.
- I have a lot of opinions on good, evil, and the whole idea of “good vs. evil.” As a lot of my opinions are bound up in my witchcraft practice and this movie explores those themes a lot, I feel it’s a good choice to use the movie to explore those topics.
I think it’s important to understand that historically, fairy tales and similar stories are meant to express and communicate values.2 They are used to communicate what is good, why it is good, and why it is important to embrace good. Many of these tales, as suggested in the movie, tend to express these ideas in the form of an outright battle between good and evil.
The problem with these stories is that it seems like many in today’s society try to see our world as a battle between good and evil. They want to draw lines and declare people good or evil. Unfortunately, the real world is often much messier than that.
Perhaps I read this into the movie (we tend to do that as humans), but it seemed to me that the movie was exploring that reality by moving the complexities and nuances of reality into the realm of fairy tales itself. This was most aptly displayed when Agatha is challenged with the accusation that she doesn’t actually believe Sophie is good after all by responding that it’s true, but only because she doesn’t believe that anyone is totally good or totally evil. It shows this in more subtle ways by taking a critical look at the “School for Good” in particular and in how it handles things like expelling students who fail out.3
Of course, this gets explicitly shown when Sophie manages to get the Good students to attack the Evil students unprovoked, suddenly reversing the roles of everyone. Suddenly, the Evil students all become beautiful and lovely while the Good students become ugly. And of course, the Evil (now “Good”) students turn around and defend themselves — though I will note that they do so without any sense of proportionality. As a viewer, it just seemed like everyone (except Aggie) in that scene had proven themselves to be terribly immoral.
I felt the movie could have done a bit better defining “good” and evil.” They gave a few hints when they suggested that the most powerful emotion for magic on the Good side was empathy. Also the rule that good always defends, but never attacks first was pretty good. And of course, you had the original fight against Rafal and his brother at the beginning when Rafal says that Evil will never cooperate or share. Rafal never really explains the difference between “fairy tale evil” and “real evil,” though he notes that it’s the latter he wants to usher in. I might speculate that fairy tale evil seems to be more about selfishness and pettiness whereas “real evil” seems to be about utter destruction and annihilation, but that’s based on very little actual exposition or explanation.
One of the things I will note is the commentary the movie makes on the desire for power. Many of the characters seem to desire it, including the good ones. It seems to be mostly Aggie who has no interest in it. In fact, she seems to almost entirely motivated by her twin desires to return home to her mother and help/protect Sophie.
I also liked that it at least questioned — though not always well — some common tropes, like the linking of beauty to good and ugliness to evil with the beautiful carnivorous flowers. Of course, this makes the fact that they fall into the “evil witch as an ugly hag” trope toward the end all the more disappointing.
Of course the movie still fails to answer questions I always have about the idea of balancing good an evil. What is the purpose of such a balance? What does such a balance really look like? I personally think the idea of evil and good in balance is in itself a trope that needs to be challenged and would have liked to see the movie go that far. But overall, I think it did a pretty good job of exploring some of the moral questions about good vs. evil in an entertaining and thoughtful manner.
1Seriously. I loved both The Craft and Practical Magic. But I’d like to cover some movies that aren’t more than twenty years old in this blog series.
2In some ways, I think they do a better job at this than many myths, and think that many of us who are looking to find connections would be well served by exploring these old tales at least as much as the myths we have, if not more.
3It’s not clear whether the School for Evil handles its expelled students in the same way, though I feel there’s a strong hint that it does. But then, such cruelty would be expected of a school that promotes evil, yes?