Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches – The Dark Place

By: Kelly Kearney

The supernatural witchy drama is back, and the tragedies in Rowan’s life keep multiplying. After the loss of her adopted mother, the young doctor pours her grief into a new mission: finding her birth family. Little does she know her biological mother, Deidre Mayfair, is slowly awakening from her medically induced fugue to do the exact same. A mother/daughter reunion is in the works- just don’t tell Aunt Carlotta!

 From Donnelaith to the ‘Cisco Bay

We open in Donnelaith, Scotland in the year 1681. There we met a medicinal expert, Aoife (Nadine Lewington), and her two daughters, Suzanne (Hannah Alline) and Florie (Emma Rose Smith). We see the young women picking herbs one afternoon while being watched by a man from behind a tree. In a panic, older sister Suzanne tells Florie to close her eyes and start reciting the names of the herbs their mother sent them to pick while she secretly sexually pleasures the spy against the tree. For her part, she doesn’t seem thrilled about any of it. In fact, she has her hand over the man’s mouth while grimacing through the entire act as if she has no control over what she’s doing. Whoever these women from the past are, they have direct ties to the present story of the comatose Diedre Mayfair and her long-lost daughter, Dr. Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddario).

Jumping ahead to the present, the San Franciscan neurosurgeon is grieving the loss of her adopted mother, Ellie (Erica Gimpel), and pouring all that loss into finding her birth parents. Rowan places a call with the adoption agency Ellie always told her she came from, but the person on the other end of the phone can’t help her. It’s not that the agency won’t share the records, it’s that the business didn’t even exist when she was born. Ellie lied, and Rowan has no idea why or what to trust anymore. On top of all the loss and confusion about where she came from and whether or not she is magically exploding brains when she gets upset, Rowan is starting to feel an evil presence around her, and it has a name: Lasher (Jack Huston). Her demon-Daddy has been keeping tabs on her ever since Deidre Mayfair (Annabeth Gish) removed her necklace binding him to her property. Now Diedre is slowly coming out of her haze thanks to her new doctor who refuses to drug her into a complaint stupor and hides it from her nurse, Delphine (Deneen Tyler), and Aunt Carlotta Mayfair (Beth Grant), Deidre’s ultimate plan – to escape her captivity and find the daughter her aunt stole from her. Reuniting with Rowan might be her main priority but she saves a bit of time for a hookup with her baby daddy, too. The relationship between these two is a bizarre one and we get a peek at what exactly that looks like now that Lasher is practically controlling Deidre from her conscious coma. Some of their interactions feel paternal, as he guides her with a well-positioned hand on her shoulder, but in other moments the two have no problem turning that Daddy energy into foreplay. Poor Rowan, first she loses Ellie and now she is about to find out her bio-parents are really into role-playing.

Therapy Can’t Cure Magic

Speaking of Diedre and Lasher’s love child, Rowan is beside herself with grief and thinks it might be time to pour her energy into work since she seems to be hitting dead ends on the parental search. At the hospital she finds out that not only isn’t she on the schedule but that she is going to have to be cleared by a psychiatrist before she’s allowed back to work. Besides the loss of her mother, she was present for two traumatic events-one with her colleague, Dr. Keck (Jim Gleason), and the other, with the hospital’s big donor, Daniel Lemle (Sylvia Grace Crim). The psychiatrist, Dr. Davis, cuts right to the chase and brings up Lemle’s untimely death-assuming Rowan would be upset by it but little does the doctor know why she would be unnerved. That’s when it happens: Rowan starts to panic-knowing she played a role in Lemle’s death, and Dr. Davis clutches her head. Rowan seems to control herself because the worst the doctor gets is a bloody nose and splitting headache, but it is a reminder that something is going on with her and maybe Ellie helped to cover that up? Rowan leaves Dr. Davis’ office and as she approaches her car in the parking lot she sees it is covered in bird droppings. She looks up in the tree above and sees a coven of crows glaring down at her. She glares back and then one by one the birds drop out of the sky-dead! All this death and unexplained events have Rowan running off to the beach where Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa) watches her cry herself to sleep in the sand.

The Reunion

Soon Rowan figures out that the man Ellie left in charge of protecting her is following her around town. Between this strange man stalking her, an army of dead birds, and the evil whispers she keeps hearing, it’s no surprise she is overwhelmed and sleepy. It’s the dream she has that the dream wakes her up to her truths about who she is and who the Mayfairs are. Rowan imagines herself in some ’80s-era Princess gown commanding her to go to the gothic house in New Orleans. When she wakes, in the middle of a beach party she wasn’t invited to, she panics and leaves without noticing she is still being watched by Grieve. Eventually, she spots him and confronts him about why he’s following her but all Ciprian says is he wants to help her and practically begs her for a private chat. That’s when he reaches out to touch her and a flash of visions-one horror show after the next fills his mind until Rowan with her magical forces knocks him back. She can’t stop exploding brains and it’s really becoming a problem. She gives him CPR and calls for an ambulance but not before she swipes his phone and unlocks it with his unconscious face. While digging for any information she finds photos of herself as well as one of Ellie with Deidre outside the same house from her dream. The photos are conveniently labeled New Orleans, so now Rowan has a location and is pretty sure she would find her birth mother there. She immediately books a flight to New Orleans to finally reunite with the woman she assumes gave her up at birth. Meanwhile, Lasher tells Deidre that her daughter is on her way home – the first time since Aun Carlotta practically ripped baby Rowan from her mother’s womb. Mother and demon-daddy celebrate the happy news by hopping into bed for old times’ sake. Unfortunately for any child-witch genetics aside, being linked to your mother isn’t always great, For example, sharing her mind while she is in the throes of passion is not how anyone should fly coach.

After that freaky Friday incestuous body morph, Rowan makes it to New Orleans where she asks some locals about the information on the Mayfair house. Everything she hears only entices her interest in figuring out who she is and what type of people the Mayfairs are. Add escape artists to the list of her family skills because just as she is chatting up the local bar flies, Deidre manages to escape her prison just as Carlotta leaves town for a convention. Deidre’s first stop: her Gatsby-Esque Cortland, Diedre trusts her uncle, but considering he is an agent of Saan, perhaps she shouldn’t. After the initial shock of seeing his niece awake and away from Carlotta’s control, Cortland listens as she tells him about Rowan and how she might reunite with her with the child her aunt took from her. He offers to help his niece and even offers to let her and the grown child live with him. Deidre winds up tracking Rowan to her hotel when she does a spell that somehow allows her to enter Lasher’s conscience just as he’s trying to grab Rowan in the shower. Her mother yells, “no” and stops the demon from harming her daughter, but not before she catches a glimpse of the hotel’s name. Now she knows where Rowan is and coincidentally she is in the same hotel that’s hosting her aunt’s convention. So, when Deidre arrives for what she assumes will be a tearful reunion, Aunt Carlotta is waiting for her with some bad news about Rowan when in fact, the young woman is upstairs on the phone with Ciprian Grieve making plans to meet. Carlotta will do anything to keep her niece from finding her daughter and she even goes as far as to imply the girl is dead. Diedre doesn’t believe it and pushes past her aunt to board the elevator, and at the same time, Rowan locks her hotel room door to hop on the elevator to meet Ciprian. When the doors open, Deidre is looking back at Rowan. And this mother-and-daughter duo instantly knows who the other woman is. Unfortunately, their happy reunion is cut short when Deidre’s throat magically slashes open as Rowan wails in pain on the floor. “I found you” are the last words she says to her mother- who bleeds out in her arms. Rowan was lost, she was found and then she lost her family all over again-all in the same week! If emotional turmoil sets off her deadly magic, the world better watch out…this witch is on the loose!