The Calling Witch Movie Recap: What Is The Link Between Virginia And Caroline?

“The Calling Witch,” directed by Mark Wilson, is an indie psychological thriller that might seem like it has a supernatural angle, at first but comfortably settles into a home invasion story with an emotional storyline. When their mother, who was a children’s author, commits suicide, Virginia and Edward start imagining the leading character of one of her ominous novels, “The Calling Witch,” manifesting itself. The more Edward thinks he sees her, the more strange things keep happening around their house, especially around their mother’s locked study. As an unusual presence starts haunting them when their father has gone away to work on an oil rig, Virginia and Edward have no one but each other to depend on. Like the siblings, I too started to wonder if a mysterious creature posing as the witch in the woods would be the one ultimately haunting them, but thankfully, the story took a more human turn and ended on a rather emotional note. “The Calling Witch” succeeds in combining atmospheric tension with a grim mood throughout, making it a fairly decent film to watch. If you’re expecting to be scared or find gore to bring certain points home, you won’t find that, but it is a good storyline, and I would say it is executed well.

Spoilers Ahead

The story begins with Virginia reading a children’s novel to her brother, Edward, written by their mother, Margaret, who had committed suicide not too long ago. What is striking is the significant age difference between the siblings, of at least 12 years, and how Virginia treats Edward like her son instead of her younger brother. But as their father prepares to leave on another project of his on the oil rig, Virginia is forced to postpone her plans of shifting to New York and starting a new life away from their home in the woods. However, a young man from town named Greg and his friends keep trying to mess with Virginia as though he’s taking revenge on something she had done in the past. But as it turns out, it was not Virginia but her mother who had hurt Greg’s mother a couple of years ago, which led her to overdose on painkillers and eventually die. When you look at where they lived, it was literally in the middle of nowhere. They had a cabin of a house in the woods with an attached treehouse with no easy access to the town. If one of them happened to hurt themselves badly, there was no way they were getting to a hospital before something serious already took place.

Without wasting time, the audience is hinted at a person lurking in the woods and leaving behind strange things for the siblings to find. They ransacked their mother’s study, broke a couple of her statues, tore her paintings, and killed Edward’s cat only to leave behind a file with documents of Margaret’s many miscarriages. For no obvious reason, Greg decides to drink a couple of beers and goes to Virginia’s house to apologize to her for bursting her cycle’s tire on the same night their father leaves. But in no time, he gets stabbed by a woman running around on the property in a dirty maxi dress, and bleeds to death. As the woman tries to invade their house, the siblings try to make sense of who she could be and how to save themselves. Virginia is running wildly with a rifle and shooting with little care. That woman turns out to be Allison, a psychiatric patient who escaped a mental health facility from a nearby town and is looking for her missing child, Caroline. Allison believed it was Virginia who had stolen her child from her house and had hidden her somewhere on the property, so she was out for blood. A psychiatrist evaluates Allison’s mental state over the radio, where he talks about how she is reliving the same day over and over when her baby girl, Caroline, was taken from her home. It can be understood that Allison had no sense of time and found herself in Virginia’s house thinking that it was Virginia who had stolen her child. 

As Virginia and Edward’s father suddenly returns to their house, he hits Allison until she is unconscious and starts preparing to get rid of Greg’s body. As he is ‘taking care’ of Greg’s body, Virginia finds a letter that Allison was carrying, which was from her mother. On confronting her father, he reveals how Margaret was mentally unstable and barren. Despite trying several times, she could not bear a child, and this turned her into an alcoholic. However, when he was working on the oil rig, a fellow worker of his told him about his drug-addict sister and her three-year-old daughter, who would most likely be taken in by the Child Protection Services. Virginia’s father decides to abduct the child when he finds her in a bad condition and her mother, Allison, was not in her senses. He brought the child to his home to Margaret, and together they raised her. That child was Virginia. Virginia was Allison’s daughter, Caroline. Her father explains that he only did that to protect her and give her a good life, but she talks about how her mother, Margaret, made her life equally horrible. It was like jumping from the frying pan to the fire for her. 

Virginia, or Caroline, has a change of heart and decides to stay with her birth mother, Allison, but there was one last twist left: Edward was not Margaret’s biological son either. He, like Virginia, had been taken from another unsuspecting mother, but unlike Allison’s letter, there was none indicating who Edward’s mother was. As their father decides to leave them when he realizes that neither of the children was willing to understand his reasons or support him, Virginia and Edward become closer again. Like Margaret, Virginia too wants to become a writer, and she decides to take Edward along with her to New York, where they can both begin again. Margaret’s story of “The Calling Witch” was about how the mother was the witch herself, and while she ate other children who were drawn to her, she couldn’t eat her own child and sacrificed her needs to protect him. Perhaps both Margaret and Allison were the ‘witches’ in this story, where neither was a perfect mother and both could safely be considered damaged people, but, in the end, both of them did love and care for their children, although not in any obvious or understandable way. I’m not sure how Virginia would take care of her own expenses along with Edward’s, but as a viewer, all I can assume is that since she is working on a novel that will eventually be picked up by a publisher, she’ll be assigned an agent, and they will take care of the rest. In the real world, that is the goldenest of golden chances for a novelist, but for the sake of the story, let’s just go with that.