The script unsettles, but never scares, so it doesn't work as a horror film. It's also not a convincing chronicle of deteriorating mental illness.
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What are critics saying?
Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s neither-fish-nor-fowl narrative plays tricks on our minds, without fully engaging our senses.
It ebbs away at the climax, but there’s 45 minutes where it sings loud and strange.
Meticulously acted, gorgeously shot and hilariously insightful about the strange, inarticulable ways people can get on one another’s nerves, this psychological thriller takes its premise to surprising, darkly comic extremes.
There’s a terrific ensemble at the heart of Magic Magic, including its talented director, but this psychological horror is only creepily superficial and has very little of anything insightful to say about people, its characters or its lead.
The film falls apart once its mysteries dissipate. With them go all the dark ambiguities that colored the first hour.
Time Out London by Tom Huddleston
The first half of Magic Magic is greatly enjoyable... Sadly, director Sebastián Silva isn’t sure where to take his characters.