Daisy Ridley plays a spiraling wife in a film that promises suspense but delivers half-baked thrills.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Poor Anette (Daisy Ridley), the mother and wife in “Magpie.” She is stuck with a terrible hairstyle as well as the job of raising and caring for her two children, newborn Lucas and a little girl named Matilda (quite good Hiba Ahmed), who is a rising young star currently shooting some sort of period film with an attractive adult star named Alicia (Matilda Lutz). The trouble is that Matilda’s father, Ben (Shazad Latif), a “writer” who drives her to set every day in his Mercedes SUV and whose job is to watch over her as she works, is a sex-crazed dirtbag who has fallen for Alicia and thinks that she is into him.
Because Ben lacks respect for her, Anette is forced to bring the infant, who can scream like a banshee, to a lunch meeting with a colleague (Alistair Petrie) from a publishing house. He notices that Anette is wearing only one earring, which causes her great distress.
Uh-oh. Leaning on a mirror in a bathroom in her beautiful modern house with a noteworthy spiral staircase and in the middle of nowhere, Anette seems about to explode or suffer a “The Substance”-like transformation into a monster of some sort. Instead, she just shatters the mirror and cuts herself.
“Magpie,” which its makers describe as a film noir, is more like a film with several ugly sweaters that go nowhere for almost two hours. While Ben trades “sympathetic” and emotionally contrived texts with Italian film star Alicia, Anette fumes with the baby. Ben paints Anette as a troubled person in his texts to Alicia, suggesting that his wife has mental issues and, in fact, appears to be correct. Ben is a big, handsome, olive-skinned guy of Anglo-Asian descent with a man-bun. But he is a wannabe cheater from the start and is no fun to be around, especially when he pleases himself while staring at a sexy leaked video of Alicia on his phone. Knock it off, man.
Phones play too big a role in “Magpie,” a film “based on an idea by Ridley,” who also serves as a producer. Do Anette’s sweaters get bigger as her anger grows? That would be too interesting. What are to make of the scene where Anette runs barefoot outside her home on the gravel out front, as if trying to escape this film, while the baby is inside alone? After stealing his phone, Anette reads Ben’s flirty-sexy texts to Alicia. I might care if Anette or Ben were interesting, sympathetic, or admirable in some way. But they are just such one-dimensional drips.
Directed by Sam Yates, who has made an Agatha Christie TV movie and worked in the British theater, and scripted by Ridley’s husband, the actor Tom Bateman (they met on the set of “Murder on the Orient Express”), making his writing debut, “Magpie” has a bit of a “Day for Night” vibe. We can imagine the set of the film while director Yates shoots Matilda at work on her set. We hear some Jarvis Cocker/Steve Mackey tune “Black Magic.” Anette, who is not exactly an “icy Hitchcock blonde,” starts applying blood-red lipstick to her look. We wonder what she is up to—a lot—without knowing what it is. Pippa Bennett-Warner makes a nice impression in the otherwise thin role of a production assistant named Esther. At a park with Matilda, Anette runs into an old friend who thinks she and Ben have separated and tells her how Ben “came on” to another member of their circle. Anette coldly informs her that she and Ben are still together and huffily marches off, Matilda in hand. Huh?
Anette then slips something nasty into Ben’s dinner so that she can go on set with Matilda the next day and get a load of Alicia, who is perfectly nice and polite and cares for Matilda. A sweating Ben, meanwhile, spends the day in the bathroom, explosively excreting. Are your eyelids getting heavy?
In a variation on a jump cut, while driving Ben and Matilda in the woods, Anette suddenly slams on the brakes, blaming a “deer thing.” A “magpie” is a bird but also a person who “collects things or talks obnoxiously.” I’m not sure who that person is supposed to be in “Magpie.” The ending is typically contrived and a bit too convenient. Also on the soundtrack are the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards song “Out of Time” and another classic, “Little Bitty Pretty One.” This “Magpie” doesn’t fly.
‘Magpie’
Rating: R for language and some sexuality.
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Matilda Lutz, Shazad Latif, Hiba Ahmed
Director: Sam Yates
Writer: Tom Bateman
Running time: 90 minutes
Where to Watch: Alamo Drafthouse Seaport
Grade: C+
Boston Movie News 