Magic Magic

Dir: Sebastián Silva

2013

**

It's never really clear what Sebastian Silva intends the story to be about in his 2013 film Magic Magic, to say he left it to the audience to interpret is too much of a cop out in my opinion. It is described as a psychological thriller and the main character (played well by Juno Temple) is said to have undisclosed issues, with many people speculating that she either suffers from paranoid schizophrenia or is the victim of ancient indigenous curses from Chilean folk-law that involve disturbing animal behaviour, hypnotic trances and the dark arts. I saw it more as an exploration of the rather clichéd middle-American paranoia attached to foreign travel, it might be neither and it might be all of the above, personally I couldn't care less. Juno Temple's performance was good but watching a group of vacuous young people agitate each other for ninety minutes wasn't my idea of a good time. There are times when the desired senses of intrigue, dread and suspense reach the desired effect but for most of the film every scene leads to an anti-climax, the films big ending being the worst offender. I have no problem with deconstruction but this film is a mess. It stinks of a shoot now and work out what it is all about later ideology. Silva has claimed that Michael Cera's character is "one of my favourite characters I've made in a movie". Personally I think it's one of the most flawed characters in any movie but considering he'd only made three movies at this point and each movie had around eight actors each on average I'm not going to disagree with him. Apart from Juno Temple there really isn't much to the film at all. It's somewhere between cheap horror and the most amateurish of indie, Silva does have a good eye and the film looks good throughout, I just don't think much of his characters, their development and his overall writing. I especially dislike the title.