The story follows Alicia (Juno Temple, Killer Joe) who goes to visit her cousin Sarah (Emily Browning, The Uninvited) in Chile. A small group including Sarah, her friend Barbara and boyfriend Agustin, and Agustins friend Brink (Michael Cera) vacation to Pagoda when suddenly Sarah is forced back to school to retake an exam (or so were lead to believe) and Alicia must make the trip with the remaining group on her own. As the group becomes more and more hostile, Alicia suffers bouts of insomnia and start losing her grip on reality.
The film was helmed by a Chilean-American filmmaker who ended up doing two low budget flicks with Cera this last year. Sebastian Silva is definitely making fast work as an up-and-coming director as both films (this and Crystal Fairy) are getting a lot of hype. Magic Magic is a good movie that suffers from a number of problems that are hard to overlook and although Silva definitely shows off his chops as a thriller director it seems as he might not be ready to handle screenwriting duties.
Slow burn is definitely a phrase that fits this film with pinpoint accuracy. During the first half of the movie, the viewer has no idea where its going. Even though its been touted as a psychological thriller and even tagged by some as a horror flick, its ends up plopping down right into some strange limbo between the two. Its quietly disturbing, a number of questionable moments that one could shrug off if taken one at a time are stacked on top of each other and leave the watcher wondering just where the plot is leading Alicia and ourselves. We slowly see the disassembly of Alicias mental state and with every day the once passive aggressive group becomes physically and sexually sadistic. Nothing ever delivers true shocks or scares but there is definitely an unsettling feeling throughout the majority of the movie.
Juno Temple and Michael Cera both do an excellent job in their respective roles of the mentally unstable Alicia and the eccentric deviant Brink. Temple is fragile and her steady decline and breakdowns are well portrayed and believable. She often carries about an absent look that is befitting her character but she has constant outbursts and often comes as rude and unlikable. Considering the movie is about her breakdown, having her so detached takes a lot away from us as viewers. Its not easy to care about someones problems when we dont care about them. This is more of a scripting problem than an acting problem though. Its strange to see Cera in this role but he becomes increasingly creepy and ultimately ends up being a disturbing characters in a strange story, making him easily the biggest scene stealer of the show.
With big props to Cera and Temple, as well as Silva for direction and Christopher Doyle for cinematography, the movie snares itself with a undecisive plot and theme and a frustratingly incoherent ending. While many of the technical aspects of the movie are worth noting, at its core it moves at a languid pace and in too many directions. Its a great stepping stone for Silva, who could possibly do awesome things in the genre, but Magic Magic is stuck between a rock and a hard place: too strange to connect but not strange enough to be memorable.
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