Movie Thoughts: A Girl Named Willow (2025)

• Released: February 27th, 2025
• Directed by: Mike Marzuk
• Running time: 1h 40min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A girl (Willow) inherits a forest and discovers that she hails from a long line of witches. Together with three new witch-friends they train in the magical arts. When two greedy people want to take down the forest to build a mall, Willow and her friends will have to work together to stop them. 

My Thoughts

I don't think this is a great movie, per se, but I did enjoy it. I don't know, it's relatively small-scale and laid-back, but I kind of liked that? This is just a nice "vibe-movie". It's just Willow chilling in the forest, befriending her new witch-pals and learning magic. And honestly, that was enough for me to carry the movie. Not everything needs to be a huge epic to be good.

The characters are also decent. I liked the main four girls, they are pretty well-written (especially the first three) and their friendship feels believable. If I do have an issue here, it's that's Lotti, the fourth friend, tags along really late into the movie and therefore we don't get to know her as well, and her friendship with the others doesn't feel as believable. 

She is still a likable character, don't get me wrong, but she feels a bit underwritten when compared to the first three who all feel distinct and like we really get to see them grow close. With Lotti I feel that she was added a bit late to the cast, and doesn't get much time to shine. She does end up playing a major role in saving the forest, which is nice, but I'd have liked to spend more time with this character to get to know her more and make her friendship with Willow and the others feel more believable. Lotti is also the only character of color in the main cast, so it feels extra sour that she was so underwritten when her white peers get more development and time to shine.

I also didn't quite vibe with Grimmoor, he's fine but I never really felt a deeper attachment to this character like the movie is clearly trying to. He's a nice mentor figure and all, but I never quite got the vibe that he really build up a personal connection that goes beyond mentorship with these girls. And I think that the intention here was that, at least for Willow who recently lost her mother and doesn't have a great father, Grimmoor becomes at least somewhat of a parental figure to her. And, similar to Lotti, he is in that aspect a bit underwritten so it doesn't really come across that well. But again, I didn't dislike him or anything. He just could've been handled a bit better.

The villains were okay, pretty much your greedy businessmen stereotypes (except that one of them is a woman, I guess. Business-people then?). My main issue with this movie though, much more than the slightly underwritten characters of Lotti and Grimmoor, is the extremely lame climax this movie has.

You'd think that, with the movie being about these girls learning to hone their powers in order to save the forest, there'd be some excitement in the climax. But nope, this is quite literally one of the slowest and least exciting climaxes I've ever seen in a story. Like I said before, I don't need this to be a huge epic or anything, but at least something exciting would be nice. 

What happens instead? The girls mildly scare away the lumberjacks and make a large machine move in the direction of a car. The Vultures could've just jumped out of the machine/aside and nothing bad would've happened to them. At worst, their car would've gotten destroyed (which doesn't even end up happening). But apparently these mild inconveniences are enough to chase away our villains, which is pretty lame to be honest. I'd have expected them to put up more of a fight, and I expected more from the girls as well. 

But despite my gripes with this movie, I did overall enjoy it. This is just a pretty cozy and comfortable movie. And a nice movie for those who like fantasy, stories of friendship, and nature.