In that case, I'm afraid you are far from updating the mod.
All the "launching of IntelliJ" is going to do is load the Gradle file, which is only used to setup the workspace (and other misc stuff such as building the mod). It won't give an error as long as you have a valid build.gradle.
After that, you will still have to actually update the code. I would expect a mod like Witchery to have about 80000+ lines of code, and the majority of those need to be rewritten due to the large update. I would suggest to learn more about Minecraft modding first before tackling on a large project like this.