Daisy Ridley’s mean little neo-noir Magpie forgets to give its characters any character
Courtesy Shout! Studios
There are few genres we’re more on board for than the tiny cat-and-mouse thriller—especially those that feel like a stage play captured on film… those intimate games with twists, turns, and a chance for a small set of actors to just go hard in the paint. Last month’s Hitchcockian thriller The Wasp turned a muder-for-hire thriller into a crooked extrapolation tale pitting Naomie Harris against Natalie Dormer, and we couldn’t have dug it more. More similar high expectations toward a small budget turnabout, today we turn our attention toward Magpie—a taut little tale of cruelty and betrayal.
Based on “an original idea by Daisy Ridley” written by Tom Bateman (Murder on the Orient Express, Thirteen Lives), and directed by Sam Yates (VANYA, The Hope Rooms), Magpie is a darkly-tinged neo-noir. A married couple Anette (Daisy Ridley) and Ben (Shazad Latif), watch as their lives begin to fracture when their daughter (Hiba Ahmed) is cast alongside a glamorous movie star, Alicia (Matilda Lutz) in a major motion picture.
The combination of a leaked celeb sex tape and close proximity on set leads to Ben and the famous actress spending long hours together, both on and off set. Anette’s suspicions of an indecent arrangement between her husband and a beautiful starlet start to find footing, and it only gets worse from there.
Courtesy Shout! Studios
Our four main actors here turn in captivating work. Ridley nails a combination of a sleep-deprived mom and gaslight lover with disarming discontent, Ahmed is the perfect child actor innocently flubbing machinations beyond her measure, Lutz brings power as someone both fully aware of their while out of their depth, and Latif is one of the most unforgivable motherfuckers committed to celluloid this year.
Without diving into spoiler territory, that last bit is sort of the highest and lowest mark of the film. The sonofabitch husband is so unrelentingly shitty right outta the gate—and remains at that same volume from start to finish—that the film lacks an ebb and flow. Rather than being cat-and-mouse, this is just an unrelenting punishment of mid-tier shitty boyfriend cheating and flirty text messages, while Ridley fixates at points in the distance and neurotically hints at a plan, somewhere under the surface. It’s a revenge movie where there’s no revenge, and even the inevitable comeuppance comes too late and too neatly. After 80 minutes of constantly wanting bad things to happen to this bad man, the resolution feels like a win for the women in his life, but not nearly proportional to the pain he’s doled out.
Still, a worthwhile watch and beautifully shot, the credit of “from an original idea by Daisy Ridley” seems to sum this up appropriately: there was a situation worth exploring but no characters or theme to fill it out.
Magpie is streaming on-demand starting Nov. 12, 2024.
