Critics reviews

Hoffmann is excellent, facing off Jamie's hostility with a palpable sense of inner peace and managing to a make a character who could so easily have been a parody of a new-age nutjob come across like a genuine individual... For a small film that was never meant to be made, Crystal Fairy is quite the achievement, and while it masquerades as a comedy, it runs along sociological tramlines that also relay some ugly truths.

[I]t’s the psychological, even spiritual, transformations that occur over the course of their experience that the movie, in its marvelously underhanded way, is really about.

This approach is interesting to an extent, but ultimately the story buckles under the pressure of its own ambiguity. Is there anything more to Jamie besides a crippling pattern of neediness and egotism? Will he ever change? Is Crystal simply a free spirit at peace with her own past trauma? We'll never know.

It’s best to approach Crystal Fairy not as a narrative, but as a distillation of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It isn’t clean; it isn’t routine. It isn’t completely coherent or tightly structured. It’s hilarious, awkward, surprising, random, moving, unrepeatable and distinctly memorable.

The narrative may feel inconsequential, but from moment to moment it pulses with a real sense of uncertainty. That's a good approximation of what being in your early 20s feels like, when the exhilaration of being newly independent clashes with the fear that you have no idea what you're doing. In valuing mood over storytelling, Silva articulates this feeling with startling accuracy.

Apropos of its lethargic drug trip, Crystal Fairy is ultimately a neutral film in tone, structure and impact. The final attempt to wrench some sense of consequence out of this well-observed but quickly dissipating diversion of a film doesn't give it a new dimension so much as it offers a bad come down.

Crystal Fairy's own magic trick is that it plays out with a lighthearted ease and charm as beguiling as the main characters are aggravating. As with his breakthrough dark comedy, The Maid (wherein the lead listed in exactly the opposite direction of Crystal Fairy's—so far withdrawn into herself is she that her personality needs to be coaxed out by another), Silva reveals himself to be a humanist, devoting attention to protagonists another director might dismissively skip over.

Crystal Fairy is tough at times to watch — the characters aren't typically likable and Silva's muddy, handheld aesthetic isn't exactly pleasant. But the film captures a particular kind of social dynamic so well that it's hard not to be mesmerized by it, too... By the end, not unlike its characters, Crystal Fairy doesn't quite know what to do with itself.

Silva's pacing is languid, ostensibly to reflect the rhythms of real life, but that isn't always compelling from a viewer's perspective. And while Silva takes no sides himself, he may be a little too detached. But in the quiet, natural beauty of his surroundings, in the still of the night, his characters reveal an unmistakable humanity.

The film never misses the opportunity to play their opposing temperaments for laughs, but it also pulls off the neat trick of casually underlining their narcissism without losing sympathy for either of them.

For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.

The movie is so deceptively easygoing that it feels semi-improvised by the actors... The seeming casualness is such that, at a certain point, you feel like a traveler on a real-life journey...