Cage Match: Season of the Witch (2011)

“Season of the Witch” gives us a woefully restrained Cage in a dull crusade through bad CGI, buddy banter, and squandered B-movie potential.

TL;DR: If The Wicker Man is Cage’s mad masterpiece of meme-worthy mayhem, Season of the Witch is the lethargic hangover. It’s not offensively bad… just aggressively mediocre. 

IN THIS CORNER: KELLY MINTZER

The Lowdown 

I waxed slightly rhapsodic recently about the charms of a Nicolas Cage movie that does everything wrong and somehow turns out right, so you might think I’m in a forgiving mood. Unfortunately, Season of the Witch inspires no such depth of feeling.

The movie is a sort of genre mess, but not in that inspired way, where you feel it defies labels and moves beautifully across boundaries. It’s just kind of… bad.

I admit, the odds were stacked against me liking it from the start. To give full and fair context, the first time I saw it (I’ve seen this piece of shit twice! TWICE!) I was prepared for something wildly different. I was on an adventure with my mom and aunt to visit the graveyard in Evans City, where Night of the Living Dead was filmed, and the plan was to watch that classic in the hotel room the night before. We had the DVD; unfortunately, the room did NOT have a DVD player, so we pivoted.

Season of the Witch was showing on the hotel’s On Demand channel and seemed like it might, at least, be spooky.

It wasn’t. It still isn’t.

I don’t have a ton to say, either positive or negative, about Season of the Witch. It’s not a good movie, make no mistake. Still, it’s not necessarily egregiously bad either—it’s questionable commentary on witch hunting aside. (“She’s not a witch, but she IS possessed by a demon,” is a kind of weird and uncomfortable position to take when exploring an actual historical period where women were systematically murdered for not conforming to men’s ideals of them.)

Unfortunately, as a result of hinting at neither extreme, it becomes just kind of dull.

On the other hand, it has a perfectly okay Nicolas Cage performance and the always-welcome Ron Perlman on hand as his brother-in-arms. The duo play a pair of disillusioned crusaders (hey, at least this movie had the grace to recognize that the Crusades were monstrous; I’ll give it that much at least) tasked with transporting a suspected witch to a monastery. There, she’ll be tried and—let’s be honest—inevitably found guilty and executed so that the plague she has apparently caused can end.

Wackiness ensues. Kind of. I mean, in theory, this is a pretty fun, bonkers setup for a movie; it just never quite knows how to harness the kooky potential.

Season of the Witch feels like a throwback to me, only in that it feels like the kind of movie I might have found on TV, back when terrestrial cable was still a thing, and put on to half pay attention to while I did homework.

It doesn’t stand well as a solo piece of entertainment. I’m not sure it does itself much of a favor by using a historical setting either. It feels too earnest for such a silly concept (at the same time, when else COULD they set it? I get that…), but also, Nic Cage feels so anachronistic in period pieces. He’s too “of” this time. More on that later.

I can’t say the movie’s an unmitigated disaster. It’s just extremely forgettable. As previously mentioned (paragraph 2, Kelly, you were so young), I’ve now seen it twice.

I promise you, barring a hostage situation, there will be no third viewing. Not because it’s awful; it’s just not necessary.

The Cage Factor: 

It’s too anodyne to be anything other than a Cautious Cage. Honestly, Nic’s awful wig is almost reason enough to watch it (lord, the wigs we’ve seen for this column!). It did, however, make me wrestle a little with the reality of our guy’s work. I am a fan of Nicolas Cage. Obviously, otherwise this would be a terrible task I’ve undertaken. With very few minor exceptions, I do not think he is the kind of actor who disappears into a role. The best Cage roles use his recognizability and his strange, Nic Cage-ness as powerful tools for the character.

There are outliers. I think Adaptation and Pig are both examples of movies where I can lose the Nic Cage of it all and really embrace him as someone else.

But then there’s Longlegs or Moonstruck—2 movies I adore and that I think understand that it’s impossible, for the most part, to forget that the actor on screen is Nicolas Cage. Those movies wisely lean into that undeniable truth.

A movie like Season of the Witch would benefit from a less personality-specific actor. He simply doesn’t fit in that period at all, and I spent much of the movie unable to accept the reality of the world because, hello, Nicolas Cage is there. The red coat in Schindler’s List. It doesn’t make it unwatchable, but it is an interesting dilemma.

AND IN THIS CORNER: STEPHANIE MALONE

The Lowdown 

There’s a particular breed of movie that seems genetically engineered for Saturday afternoon cable rotation. You can put it on in the background while you work around the house. It’s pleasant enough to keep you light company, but you aren’t eager to give it your undivided attention. That’s Season of the Witch to a tee.

It’s the kind of film that feels one or two ingredients shy in the potion for greatness, but instead conjures something far more bland than inspired.

Directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds), the film follows two disillusioned Crusader knights—Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman)—as they escort a suspected witch (Claire Foy, in one of her earliest roles) accused of spreading the Black Plague to a remote monastery. What follows is a road trip through pestilence and paranoia that’s half horror, half fantasy quest, and somehow still not enough of either.

If SEASON OF THE WITCH endures in any form, it’s thanks to the chemistry between Cage and Perlman.

Perlman, ever the grizzled comic relief, seems to know exactly what kind of movie he’s in and leans into it with self-aware gusto.

There’s also something oddly endearing about the film’s B-movie sincerity. It’s trying… I mean, it’s really trying… to be epic. The gloomy cathedrals, mud-slick villages, and fog-drenched forests create an atmospheric medieval world.

The concept is cool. A cursed pilgrimage to deliver an alleged witch through plague-ridden lands? Sign me up. If only the execution matched the potential. Unfortunately, Sena’s direction is lifeless—the tone wavers, ineffectively, between grimdark drama and buddy comedy. The writing is lackluster, and the script squanders the potential impact of its mystery.

At its best, it feels like a forgotten entry in the early 2000s wave of historical action-horror, where grit and grandeur went hand in hand with questionable CGI.

At its worst, it deserves to stay forgotten.

The Cage Factor:

Not every crusade deserves a Cage.

As Behmen, Cage delivers a subdued, earnest portrayal of a tormented knight. He’s somber, stoic, and quite capable. But this is also a time where restraint betrays him.

His haunted, soft-spoken hero feels airlifted from a more grounded epic, not the campy supernatural romp he’s actually in. The film desperately needed his particular brand of unmatched chaos to liven things up.

He’s frequently upstaged by Perlman, who brings vitality and wit that are missing from Cage’s performance. Perlman is a treasure himself, and it’s not hard for him to steal the show. But Cage could have made this another cult classic had he been allowed to do what he does best: crank the insanity dial to eleven. Instead, he’s stuck somewhere around a four, and the film suffers for it.

In The Wicker Man, Nicolas Cage punched bees, wore a bear suit, and achieved cinematic immortality. In Season of the Witch, he broods in chainmail and forgets to have fun.

Sometimes, the true magic lies not in restraint… but in glorious, unhinged excess.