The Covenant (2006)

Renny Harlin's The Covenant arrives from 2006 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing. Four young men at a Massachusetts prep school descend from colonial witch families, their powers ripening toward an eighteenth birthday ascension, while a fifth bloodline thought extinct comes calling. There are swimming competitions, a bonfire, a comatose girlfriend, and a father whose body has aged into ruin from magical overuse. The whole thing resolves through sacrifice and a duel. It is a teen soap opera wearing a dark fantasy coat, and it wears it badly, which is part of the appeal.

The cultural inventory is thin to the point of barren. Sarah and Kate exist as a love interest and a girlfriend, then as a hostage and a hospital patient. The cast is overwhelmingly white, and Jessica Lucas's presence as Kate passes without a line of comment. The film has no interest in race, class, sexuality, the environment, body image, or the workings of the mind. Critics have spent years noting a queer charge among the four leads. That charge is accidental, a byproduct of handsome young men in wet swimwear, and accident does not constitute intent.

The film offers instead a pure narrative appetite. Magic is addictive, aging, fatal. Chase wants power and takes it. Caleb refuses to endanger his friends and is saved by his father's final gift. Nobody pauses to explain what any of this says about the world. Reviews were savage, four percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a place on a worst-films list, while audiences were kinder and the opening weekend topped the charts during a quiet September. We are left with a relic from a moment when a genre picture could simply be about witches, cars, and boys who cannot stop competing. The classification is straightforward. There is nothing here to decode.