A couple's marriage hits the rocks when their daughter is cast in a movie
headlined by a beautiful Italian star.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sam Yates
Starring: Daisy Ridley, Shazad Latif, Matilda Lutz, Hiba Ahmed, Alistair Petrie
When a movie is compared to a soap opera it's usually done so in
disparaging fashion, but acclaimed theatre director Sam Yates' feature film debut Magpie is soapy in the best way. It features attractive women being
bitchy to one another, an adulterous affair, Machiavellian scheming,
real estate porn and killer outfits. And all in 90 minutes! A plotline a
soap opera would stretch out for six months is efficiently unspooled in
a single sitting, and it's a campy treat.
The film is based on an idea by Daisy Ridley, and the
screenplay is penned by her husband Tom Bateman. They must
have a very secure relationship, as Magpie is centred on a marriage that's hanging on by a thread. Anette
(Ridley) was left to take care of her newborn son Lucas when her
absolute rotter of a writer husband, Ben (Shazad Latif),
selfishly left the country for eight months to work on his latest book.
Ben has now returned, with no evidence that he got much writing done, to
an unsurprisingly hostile home environment. Focussing on their young
daughter Matilda's (Hiba Ahmed) burgeoning career as a child
actor, Ben leaves the raising of his son almost exclusively to Anette,
who can't bring herself to directly confront her swine of a husband and
instead makes passive aggressive jibes about his failing writing
career.
When Matilda lands a role in a period drama starring Alicia Romano (Matilda Lutz), a beautiful Italian actress whose sex tape recently leaked onto the
internet, Ben decides he will chaperone Matilda while Anette is left at
home to literally hold the baby. Ben is predictably immediately smitten
by Alicia, who forms an instant sisterly bond with Matilda. Aware of
Alicia's troubles, Ben fakes a nice guy routine, picking up some
unearned brownie points when he calls out a group of male crew members
for sharing Alicia's sex tape, a viewing of which he has "enjoyed"
himself on occasion. When filming is called off one day, Alicia invites
Ben and Matilda to her home, and rather than excusing himself and
explaining that he has a wife and newborn son at home, Ben jumps at the
chance. Alicia seems to fall for his pseudo-sensitive routine and they
exchange phone numbers. When Anette sees paparazzi pictures of her hubby
with Alicia under the headline "Who is Alicia's new mystery man?" she
begins to finally stand up for herself and sets out to scupper the
nascent affair.
You may find yourself rolling your eyes early on at the amount of
psychological thriller clichés that quickly pile up in Magpie. A bird flies straight into the glass window of Anette and Ben's
impossibly expensive home, an overused portent of trouble to come.
Anette breaks a mirror with her suppressed rage. An uneaten casserole is
angrily tossed into a bin, dish and all. I'm frankly amazed we didn't
get the obligatory "troubled woman" signifier of Anette taking a bath
and dipping her head below the waterline. But for all its embracing of
cheap tropes, Magpie has some originality and invention to offer. There's a moment
that sees a frayed Anette unable to bear her son's screams and so she
runs out of her house and across an adjacent field until the baby
monitor in her hand loses coverage and she can bask in silence. It's a
potent example of a former theatre director using that great advantage
filmmaking offers - space - to externalise a character's psychological
state.
With her excellent central performance in the recent Sometimes I Think About Dying, Ridley proved there was life beyond Star Wars, and she's fantastic
once again here. She initially draws our sympathy, her big eyes
expressing the loneliness Anette is feeling in living with a husband who
is just as absent when he's at home as when he's away pretending to pen
the next Great British Novel. But as Anette starts to stand up for
herself Ridley makes her genuinely intimidating, almost disturbingly so.
To continue the soap opera comparison, it's like watching Sue Ellen
evolve into JR. It's a joy watching Anette react to the awful people in
her social circle as she comes to realise her life has been spent in the
company of frauds, with one of the highlights being a horrifyingly
awkward encounter with a tactless former co-worker who mistakenly
believes Anette and Ben are now separated.
Magpie will play especially well to an audience of women who feel
underappreciated in their roles as wives and mothers. In Anette they'll
find an anti-hero to cheer on, and the whopper of a twist ending will
see many a carpet stained as glasses of wine are knocked off coffee
tables in sheer delight. But everyone can enjoy seeing a woman scorned
standing up for herself, and this embittered housewife serves her
revenge piping hot, straight out of the oven.
Magpie is in UK/ROI cinemas
from November 11th.
