Casting a Spell for Connection During the Pandemic

In August, 2019, the director and actress Jane Stiles received a link to an audiobook from her friend and frequent creative collaborator Meryl Jones Williams. The book, titled “Visionary Activist Astrology,” is a guide to divining the relationships between celestial bodies—the stars, the planets—and our own earthly interactions. Stiles told me that, at the time, she believed “the magnetic pull of the planets” influenced the course of human lives, but she didn’t know much about astrology beyond the basics.

In addition to celestial charts, the book also contains instructions for meditations and rituals, including an incantation to Venus that is said to summon love. “And, at the time, I was really lovesick and lonely,” Stiles told me, in a conversation over Zoom. “I was filled with a lot of longing.” Intrigued, she decided to collect the necessary materials for it.

The ritual inspired Stiles and Williams’s latest film, “The Love Spell.” In it, a young woman, played by Stiles, listens intently to an audio recording about summoning love. (Stiles recorded her own version of the spell in the book; her interpretation includes a tribute to the full moon.) As the woman prepares for the spell, she embarks on a materials-gathering mission, procuring a bright-yellow tapered candle and a loaf of bread. She wears an oversized, tie-dyed T-shirt printed with a faded horse head over tight black bicycle shorts, her bleached-blond hair pulled back with a fat scrunchie. The look is very nineties babysitter, and she is, in fact, a nanny; the next scene shows her arriving at the luxe New York apartment of a glamorous mother and her imaginative young son, Sebastian. As the mother heads out on a date—“I joined an app,” she says, as she sails out the door—Sebastian plays by himself in his bedroom. Wearing a hairnet, an N95 mask, and make-believe hospital scrubs, he gently covers his stuffed-animal patients with tiny blankets. “I’m gonna take your blood pressure,” he says. “It’s getting better! Good job!”

The coronavirus pandemic is present in the film—almost a character itself. Stiles and Williams began talking about the film in December, 2019, but in March of the following year the pandemic hit New York City, seemingly putting a kibosh on their production. But, after the initial paralysis of lockdown faded, they began meeting up—at a safe distance—in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Williams brought a Super 8 camera and the two started taking footage of each other, savoring the act of creation. Stiles and Williams, who co-directed the film, quickly decided that they didn’t want to wait for the pandemic to pass, and they began shooting in August, 2020.

When they look back at it now, they regard the film as a “special time capsule,” Stiles said. Williams concurred. “It also felt like such a lonely time. It almost enriched the film. Rather than feeling like an obstacle we had to work around, it was, like, ‘God, we’re really feeling this way.’ ” She thought for a second. “We were all struggling, but kids were struggling a lot, and working with a child at that time”—the young actor Sebastian Sinclair plays the child—“was a beautiful experience, because he was just so excited to be stimulated by something.” Seeking connection is a strong theme in the film, with the young woman conducting her spell in the hope of attracting love, Sebastian’s mother swiping optimistically, and Sebastian tending to his imaginary patients.

Before we said goodbye, I asked Stiles if her initial love ritual worked. “The first time I did it, I didn’t end up falling in love with somebody new immediately—although the friend I did it with did!” She laughed a little. “But I was inspired to write this script. It sparked that creative energy, which, to me, is a kind of love.”