FrightFest Halloween review – Magpie
Early in Magpie, we get a couple of classic spooky movie omens – neglected wife Anette (Daisy Ridley) presses her forehead so close to a mirror that it cracks, fracturing her reflection (and her mind?) … a black bird (magpie?) flies into the window of her isolated country house and dies (this has been turning up in a lot of films in the last few years). The set-up seems to suggest we’re in for another star turn by an actress cracking up, a movie sub-genre which has proliferated since at least Repulsion, with Ridley in a severe hairstyle (a friend acidly calls it ‘brave’) going quitly crackers as a doormat victim of a patriarchy represented by her hissably ghastly writer husband Ben (Shazad Latif), who has an evil man-bun and manages to be the worst possible partner while working on becoming the worst possible father.
Anette has given up the city, a job, friends and any independence to support Ben, who has fathered two children – Matilda (Hiba Ahmed) and her baby brother – but takes no part in the hard bits of looking after them and has reportedly gone off on multi-month ‘research trips’ when he feels like it. Matilda has landed a gig as a child actress, playing the daughter of movie star Alicia (Matilda Lutz) in a country house period drama called Eleanor, and Ben takes the fun gig of looking after her on the set, while seeing an opportunity to get into the good books of Alicia with an option on an affair. Will Anette reach for sharp kitchen implements? Or is a subtler, darker plot in play. Writer Tom Bateman – better known as an actor (he was Jekyll and Hyde on TV, as incidentally was Latif in another show) – likes heavy foreshadowing – two near-accidents while driving through woods obviously set up something dramatic – and tricksy ambiguities as some scenes will play differently on a rewatch as we start to wonder how much of what we’re led to believe is playing out in either the paranoid fantasies of the wife or the horny fantasies of the husband … with perhaps even other views from peripheral characters who have their own take on what actually happens and who the (thieving) magpie really is.
Like many actor-writers, Bateman has a talent for tart, excruciating moments of embarrassment or cruelty … Ben has a knack for lashing out verbally at precisely the wrong moment at precisely the wrong people (he really loses any traces of audience sympathy at the few points when he’s so angry he forgets to be nice to his daughter to maintain his cool Dad image) while Anette becomes more focused and controlled as the story takes over from the verge of a nervous breakdown. Directed with some precision by Sam Yates, who has mostly worked in the theatre – though he did one of those Agatha Christie-as-detective TV movies a few years back.
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