This is a tough one to rate! My main reason for watching it was Emily Browning because I adore her. But there were things I loved and mostly just one thing I hated.

I loved the location and the cinematography. I appreciated the whole “people blindly ignoring mental illness leads to tragedy” story because it’s true and it happens all the time. I’ve read that the ending was too ambiguous to many, but it wasn’t at all to me so if anyone wants to hear my take feel free to slide on in my DM’s. The performances all around were great, but Juno Temple really went all out and Michael Cera did an admirable job of being someone you truly…

An unexpected, unnerving, impressive horror film about social and psychic dislocation. Alicia (Juno Temple) travels with her cousin and cousin's friends to a remote location in southern Chile, and her discomfort--an exhaustion from travel and an introvert's unease--is exacerbated by social codes and behaviors that repel connection. Brink (a superb Michael Cera) is an outsized caricature of a sex-crazed adolescent; Barbara (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is brusque, brittle, patronizing; Sara (Emily Browning) and Agustin (Agustin Silva) are grappling with their own problems.

The movie embraces a grotesque naturalism that keeps the viewer equally decentered, nervous, frustrated. The performances are inflated yet grounded; the cinematography (by the reliably brilliant Christopher Doyle and Glenn Kaplan) is simultaneously lush and wild and formalist --…

Apart from an excellent Juno Temple and some beautiful cinematography, this film holds absolutely nothing that would earn it the label 'tense, psychological horror' that I read somewhere. It is boring, safe, predictable and tries to be smart by giving us a completely superfluous and unfitting ambiguous ending.

If you're going for a thriller and try to capture the psychological breakdown of someone you need to do something more than have her wailing around most of the time. Make us care for her, or the company she keeps. As convincing as Temple was, her character is extremely annoying surrounded by excruciatingly unpleasant people. Walk away from this liking any of the characters and I'd be impressed. Or sad. Whatever.

The…

While it doesn't at all surprise me that Magic Magic is receiving its fair share of hate from audiences, I simply cannot dismiss how effectively it creeped me out with its dread-laden atmosphere in a similar way to the equally confounding Kill List, if I am to compare. Striking a similar chord as (the superior) Rosemary's Baby with its central character riding a fierce maelstrom of paranoia as her environmental displacement, language barrier and distrust of the people around her pulls her down like a sinking stone, in a mood piece where narrative thrust is not the key, and any information we are privy to may or may not be helpful in helping us find our bearings. Juno Temple nails…

There is no way that anyone could ever make me understand why Magic Magic got some of the bad ratings that it did. I thought it was objectively fucking fantastic. It's an incredibly tense and dark thriller about a young woman with a severe mental illness who goes on a trip to Chile to hang out with her cousin and her cousins friends. The movie does the slow burn in such a masterful way. As her symptoms become worse and worse as time goes on, we are very well aware that there's something seriously wrong. The people around her, on the other hand, are somehow blissfully unaware, (for the most part). Something of note is that the vast majority of…

During fits of anxiety, I’ve heard it helps to clench your shoulders then relax. Magic Magic is like that but never releasing. It’s anxious and ambiguous while having tension twisted in the darkly comedic. Sebastian Silva’s psychological thriller takes the trite plot of a woman’s “hysteria” on vacation to Chile and adds more questions surrounding spiritualism, race, and cultural isolation. Oh yeah, and a humping dog. 

For such a familiar antidote, Magic Magic has a tonal atmosphere all its own. I like that. I like movies that are slightly off and this one has the bonus of a spot-on cast. Juno Temple plays spiraling with sympathetic confusion, annoying innocence, and the right amount of theatrical to fit the movie’s unique…