Jonathan Romney 

Magic Magic review – ‘shapeless mess’

Even a 'memorably repellent' Michael Cera can't save Sebastián Silva's film about graceless Americans abroad, writes Jonathan Romney
  
  

2013, MAGIC MAGIC
'Sneery narcissist': Michael Cera as Brink in Sebastián Silva's Magic Magic. Photograph: Allstar/BRAVEN FILMS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Photograph: Allstar/BRAVEN FILMS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Earlier this year we saw the engaging, if not so engagingly titled, Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012 – one of two films by Chilean director Sebastián Silva about graceless Americans abroad. Where the loose, mumblecore-ish druggie farce Crystal Fairy… was enjoyably scabrous, its companion piece Magic Magic, again starring Michael Cera, is a shapeless mess. Juno Temple (always watchable, often weird – and she's certainly both here) plays fragile Alicia, travelling outside the US for the first time, and lapsing into disturbed panic when she falls among less than sympathetic travelling companions on a Chilean island. Silva drums up a vague mood of hovering balefulness but the result is neither effective psycho-horror nor a full-blooded indie improv exercise. But the cast, including the director's brother, Agustín Silva, is good, and as a sneery narcissist, the usually likable Cera shows he can also be memorably repellent. He's a long way from the frozen bananas of Arrested Development.

 

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