The Witch: Part 2. The Other One
Directed by: Park Hoon-jung
Written by: Park Hoon-jung
Starring: Shin Si-ah, Park Eun-bin, Sung Yoo-bin, Jin Goo
Release Date: June 15, 2022 (South Korea)
Available on: Amazon Prime Video

The first Witch film was something special. It took the standard sci-fi action formula—secret experiments, escaped superhumans, shadowy government conspiracies—and infused it with a tightly wound, character-driven narrative. The action was thrilling, but it was the measured pacing, the gradual character reveals, and the sheer brutality of its final act that made The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion such a compelling experience. It was, as I wrote in my review, a “thrilling, character-driven sci-fi masterpiece.”

This sequel, by contrast, is a confused, bloated mess.

For the first thirty minutes, I genuinely tried to follow what was happening. By the sixty-minute mark, I gave up. By the end, I was simply waiting for the credits to roll. There is an art to complex storytelling. Some films, like The Wailing or Oldboy, demand patience and close attention, but they reward the viewer with an intricate narrative that eventually locks into place. The Witch: Part 2 does none of this. Instead, it lurches from one incoherent scene to another, throwing in a jumble of characters, betrayals, and subplots that feel neither connected nor particularly worth caring about.

The biggest issue is the protagonist. The first film gave us Ja-yoon, played with eerie brilliance by Kim Da-mi. Her transformation from seemingly vulnerable schoolgirl to an unstoppable force of destruction was executed with precision. Here, however, we have a new lead—an unnamed girl, played by Shin Si-ah—who is more or less a blank slate. She has powers. People are after her. And that’s about it. There is no emotional core, no compelling motivation, nothing to make us invest in her journey. We are simply watching a series of events unfold, seemingly at random.

Instead of focusing on a few well-developed characters, the film throws in an absurd number of new players, all of whom are introduced with the dramatic weight of an anime opening but serve little narrative function. There’s a group of generic thugs, some rival superhumans, government agents, and a mysterious scientist—all of whom show up, deliver some vague exposition, fight, and then disappear again.

That being said, some of the performances are excellent—Sung Yoo-bin and Park Eun-bin, in particular, do their best with the material they are given. Jin Goo, always reliable, brings a level of intensity that momentarily lifts the film above its own confusion. But these performances are wasted. None of the characters feels essential, and their arcs (if they have them) are lost in the chaos.

It is clear that more money was thrown at this sequel. The action scenes are bigger, the visual effects more elaborate. But they serve no real purpose beyond distracting from the fact that there is no coherent story. The first film used its action sparingly, building up to moments of extreme violence that had genuine weight. Here, we get spectacle for the sake of spectacle. People are thrown through walls, blood splatters in slow motion, telekinetic blasts send bodies flying—none of it matters because none of it feels earned.

One of the mysteries of modern cinema is why so many sequels fail so completely. All you really need to do is take what worked in the first film, tweak the formula slightly, then deliver a plot that is at least above mediocre. And yet, time and again, sequels manage to botch even these simple requirements.

Perhaps it’s arrogance—a belief that, having hooked an audience with the first film, they can throw together any old nonsense and people will still show up. Or perhaps it’s the dreaded “expansion” impulse: the urge to turn a tight, self-contained story into a sprawling “universe,” introducing unnecessary lore, multiple factions, and a dozen new characters, none of whom justify their screen time.

Whatever the reason, The Witch: Part 2 falls into all the usual traps. It doesn’t build on what made the first film great—it dilutes it. It replaces a gripping character study with a shapeless, convoluted narrative. It sacrifices clarity for spectacle, trading slow-burn tension for endless, empty action sequences.

This is not the worst film I have ever seen, but it is a crushing disappointment. A sequel should enhance and expand on the original, not reduce it to a footnote. Here, all of the intrigue and tension that made The Witch: Part 1 so compelling have been buried under an avalanche of unnecessary characters, of excessive CGI, of an incoherent script.

The real sadness is that the performances—again, I mention Sung Yoo-bin and Park Eun-bin—suggest there was a good film somewhere in here. But whatever that might have been, it is lost in the noise.

Perhaps Part 3 will find a way to redeem this series. Or perhaps it will sink even further into the hole of bad sequels. At this point, I am not optimistic.