Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Silva foreshadows this moment about a half hour earlier with a shot of the middle-aged country woman whose cactus the main characters steal. In this close-up, which occurs just after the kids run off with her plant, the character transforms from a comic dupe to a lonely, vulnerable human being. This minor gesture, which effects a brief-yet-exciting change in tone, reveals great sympathy on the filmmaker’s part. It creates the impression that, if he had the time, Silva might investigate every life that passes before his camera.
To advertise Magic Magic as a horror film is misleading. The tone may be eerie, but it isn’t particularly scary. Almost all of the frightening stuff takes place in the main character’s mind—and unlike Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, its obvious forebear, the heroine’s unstable perspective doesn’t engulf the entire movie around it. Alicia (Juno Temple) is a shy young woman from California who goes to Chile to visit her cousin (Emily Browning), who’s studying in Santiago for a semester. As soon as she arrives, she finds herself on a road trip to the south with her cousin’s boyfriend (Augustin Silva, the director’s younger brother), his sister (Catalina Sandino Moreno, of Maria Full of Grace), and a wealthy American friend (Michael Cera, nearly as obnoxious here as he was in Crystal Fairy). Alicia starts on the wrong foot with all of them—her cousin unexpectedly stays behind in Santiago, turning her into a social charity case—and things only get worse when they arrive at their destination, an isolated cabin owned by the boyfriend’s parents. For days Alicia is unable to sleep, which makes her increasingly on edge. This, in turn, further strains her relationship with the well-to-do strangers.
