Spell

Mark Tonderai directed this horror thriller from a screenplay by Kurt Wimmer. Omari Hardwick plays Marquis Woods, a successful New York attorney who learns that his estranged father has died. He flies with his wife Veora and their two teenage children to Kentucky for the funeral, but the plane goes down in a storm over the Appalachian mountains. Marquis wakes up injured in the home of an elderly woman named Eloise, played by Loretta Devine, who says she has been nursing him back to health with traditional remedies. John Beasley appears as Earl, and Lorraine Burroughs plays Veora. As Marquis recovers, he grows uneasy about his host and begins to suspect she intends to keep him there for reasons of her own; the film draws on Hoodoo folk magic as the source of that threat.

The film was released in October 2020 and runs 91 minutes. It is a co-production between the United States and South Africa, made by Radar Pictures, Paramount Players, LINK Entertainment and MC8 Entertainment, with a credited crew of 115. It was Tonderai's second feature as director, arriving eight years after House at the End of the Street. Audience response has been moderate: on IMDb it holds 5.5 out of 10 from around 11,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.4 out of 10 from roughly 470 votes. A critics' rating of 5.4 out of 10 from 50 reviews places professional opinion close to the IMDb figure, and lower than the smaller TMDB sample.