All good horror filmmakers understand the power of the suggestion and intimation, recognising that the terrors of the mind wield more power than much of what can come to fruition. It is in this murky landscape that Sebastián Silva’s Magic Magic lurks, occupying the same space as Roman Polanski’s early oeuvre in eliciting thrills from his protagonist’s psychological unravelling.
At first, Alicia (Juno Temple, The Dark Knight Rises) is the typical tentative newcomer, having travelled to Santiago to stay with her worldlier cousin Sarah (Emily Browning, Sleeping Beauty). Shy and unsure, she keeps her distance from Sarah’s friends Bárbara (Catalina Sandino Moreno, For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada), Agustín (Agustín Silva, Crystal Fairy) and Brink (Michael Cera, This is the End), never welcomed by or warming to their insular group dynamic. Alicia’s discomfort only grows as the gang trek to a remote cabin in Chile’s south, more so when Sarah departs to deal with a personal crisis.
Silva tells a loose, lingering tale of a stranger in a foreign land in similar surroundings, agitating the blackly comic narrative with the fear of the unfamiliar. Suspicion reigns, uneasiness soars, and – as the title slyly insinuates – something doesn’t feel quite right; how much stems from Alicia, and how much is inherent in the situation, provides the film’s mystery. First, her emotional state dissolves; then, her distress manifests in physical and mental symptoms; quickly, a cycle of anxiety and insomnia spirals into an inescapable distrust and inability to tell reality from delusion. At all times, Magic Magic is cognisant of Alicia’s panicked perspective, the film unravelling in tandem with her increasing disorientation.
With the assistance of dual cinematographers Christopher Doyle (The Limits of Control) and Glenn Kaplan (camera assistant on Silver Linings Playbook), as well as editors Jacob Craycroft (Robot & Frank) and Alex Rodríguez (Oscar nominated for Children of Men), Silva moulds his subjective aesthetic to match Alicia’s mindset, swelling in urgency, freneticism and surreality throughout the feature’s duration. Immersion is the goal, one achieved not so much with ease but with assurance, every aspect plunging the audience into darkness and discomposure. Danni Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ (Martha Marcy May Marlene) haunting, unrelenting score completes the disquietingly ethereal experience.
Within this visceral audio-visual canvass, Temple unfurls her best and most vulnerable work, a lost soul struggling as her character’s sense of self dissipates. Her eyes dart with apprehension, her stance crumples with alarm, but in the film’s inarguable centrepiece – a hypnotism scene that serves to further the trepidation about Alicia’s travelling companions – she is simultaneously confident and exposed, entrancing and confounding. It is in Temple’s performance that the film’s enigma comes to life, and that the intimated instability garners potency. Watching her fraying from the inside out is difficult to watch and to look away from, affording Magic Magic the source of its alluring ambiguity.
Much has been made of Cera’s against-type supporting turn, and rightly so – here, he offers not only a stark departure from the affable awkwardness for which he has become known, but an unnerving antagonist well served by the largely improvised dialogue. Whether his startling status is supported or merely supposed by a fragile mind is at the heart of the feature’s tension-filled tonal contrasts; as it pieces together the purposefully incomplete puzzle of perception and proposition, Magic Magic provides a ride through isolation and uncertainty to revel in and relish.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Magic Magic
Director: Sebastián Silva
Chile/USA, 2012, 97 mins
Sydney Underground Film Festival
suff.com.au
5 – 8 September
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