Always a Witch review: Grab some magic while waiting for new CAOS

If you are waiting for April and part 2 of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, stream Always a Witch right now to keep you magically entertained in the meantime.

Witch lovers who can’t wait until Chilling Adventures of Sabrina comes back next month, need to check out the new Spanish language series, Always a Witch on Netflix.

This Colombian series, also known as Siempre Bruja, offers a new look on the classic witch story. Carmen is a young witch and slave who has fallen for a white man in a time long ago. This, unsurprisingly, is a crime and she is brought to the stake to burn.

Carmen receives a way out of her fiery predicament in the form of an old wizard who offers her the ability to time jump into a time where witches aren’t persecuted and no one believes in witches. She must agree to give up using her powers in order for the wizard to grant her this gift.

Carmen agrees and is transported to modern-day Columbia. She starts a new life with college, friends and a normal life, except her witchy roots keep calling her back. The fun part of this series is watching Carmen react to tech such as cell phones, cars and all the modern conveniences we take for granted. Her lack of current knowledge does confuse her friends and at times makes them mad at her for failing to conform to what they see as normal.

The audience is also taken back in time through the series, to see how her love is doing in the past. Carmen tries to contact the wizard Aldemar and her lover Cristobal with varying and sometimes strange results. Eventually, she does use magic to try to help fix things and even convinces her new friends to help her in her witchcraft.

The only big problem I have with the series is that at heart, it is a love story. I would have loved to have her motivation be something other than for a man/relationship. The story could have been stronger if it simply was a witch who was transported to escape burning, not for love but just for being a witch.

I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the romantic motivation, The Daily Dot also brought that fact up in their review of the series and they pointed out the problematic element of it.

"A relationship between a master and a slave will always include an unhealthy power dynamic, no matter how much you try to write otherwise. It’s the kind of relationship that media and history have romanticized and fetishized for centuries"

The series does a good job of on screen representation of both Latinx actors and Afro-Latinx actors. I also love all the Bruja culture we are exposed to as we watch the series. As I mentioned in my review of Diablero, seeing Bruja witch culture is something American audiences don’t get as much as the Pagan-Anglo witches. I get excited when I am exposed to new cultures and Netflix has been the main source of that exposure in recent years.

I encourage any witch lovers to watch this series as it offers a different perspective to magic.

Have you watched Always a Witch yet? What did you think? Does it stack up to The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina? Sound off in the comments section below.