Magic Hour opens in select theaters on May 15.
By Elazar Abrahams
It’s never a good sign when a movie that’s well under 90 minutes feels repetitive and drawn out. But that’s the deal with Magic Hour, a new film directed by and starring Katie Aselton (The League), co-starring Daveed Diggs (Hamilton).
Now Aselton, who also wrote the movie with her husband and frequent collaborator Mark Duplass, seems like she has enough talent to stand behind the camera, and this does feel right up their usual indie lane: small cast, contained setting, relationship tension, and naturalistic conversations. The issue is that Magic Hour’s script treats its conceit as a mystery of sorts, when it’s immediately clear to everyone what lies ahead.
Spoilers follow!
Daveed Diggs’ character is dead the entire time. The couple’s tense conversations, the “you did something to me I can’t forgive” vagueness of their arguments based on an unnamed shift in their relationship… all of it is grief. It’s not remotely hidden, and anyone with a nickel of media literacy can pick up on this in the first ten minutes. Partly because of how the film blocks its scenes: other characters don’t interact with Diggs, even when he’s right there. Either this is intentionally obvious and viewers are meant to catch on, which then makes the packaging of the last few scenes as a click-into-place twist puzzling, or the filmmakers do not respect the intelligence of their audience enough and did not know how to structure an engaging movie. Neither option is ideal.
Anyways, because what it’s aiming for is obvious, the movie needs something else to enhance it, be that richer character work, more variation in the scenes, escalating tension, anything. Instead, Magic Hour circles the same emotional ideas over and over again.
The performances are solid. Aselton and Diggs are both talented, and they do what they can with the material. There are moments where the desert setting and the intimacy of two people stuck in the same emotional loop almost generates momentum by itself. But the script doesn’t give the actors enough shifts to play. It’s one register for too long, and the film quickly becomes monotonous.
Ironically, the most memorable part of the movie may be the location photography. The desert is beautiful, the isolation is real, and the atmosphere suggests a harsher, stranger film than the one that’s actually unfolding.
Ultimately, Magic Hour is a case of a short movie feeling long because it doesn’t build. It reiterates its tenderness, which blunts the whole experience.
I give Magic Hour a D+.
