Critics reviews

Carlos Vermut's second film is a barbed and bracing black comedy thriller... His distinctive voice and playful approach to genre make for an unsettling atmosphere that subverts expectations and keeps you guessing to the last.

Conservatively paced but always compelling, this Spanish suspense film takes so many psychological left turns that after a while it begins to feel like a vortex.

Elegantly lensed by Santiago Racaj, the crisp-looking “Magical Girl” is a carefully calculated exercise in genre-movie subversion, pitting what we think we know about its various characters types... against the irrational unpredictability of their actions.

Vermut has a definite cinematic voice; he paints his film in colours which call to mind Haneke, Tarantino, Lanthimos, and, clearly, the formidable Spanish cultural canon (the first few minutes alone make reference to Lorca and La Colmena). But Magical Girl has a tone of its own - dark, silky and pleasingly unpredictable.

This movie is evidence of a filmmaker with his own style and aesthetics who, after just two features, is already a benchmark for new Spanish cinema, which is breaking away from the most old-fashioned tenets of what came before it.

Between this cynical message and the stoic, formalist execution of Vermut’s direction, one could be forgiven for imagining that this movie would be unendurable. However, there is a glimmering, obsidian-black humor that is channeled not only through the dispassionate, deadpan direction, but also in the mournful, sometimes silent performances of the characters.

Behind the offbeat surface of Magical Girl, and underneath its extended, trembling silences, there’s a lot going on in terms of satire and critique.