Our multiplexes and home theaters desperately miss the erotic thriller. Every few years, one or two squeaky clean PG-13 studio productions will don the mask of the erotic thriller: recently, The Voyeurs, Sanctuary, and even Challengers. (The latter two at least flash a little bit of sex appeal even if they ultimately end up being rather sexless). In the effort to make everything hit as many market quadrants as possible — the great accountantization of the North American film industry — these films tend to be functionally neutered: erotic thrillers with a void right where the erotic should be. Directed by Sam Yates, Magpie is the latest boring and impotent addition to the genre shelf.
Daisy Ridley stars as Anette, a stay-at-home wife to the struggling and arrogant author Ben (Shazad Latif) and mother to their two children. The couple’s youngest is still an infant when their other child, daughter Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), scores a big acting gig as the daughter of hot stuff A-lister Alicia (Matilda Lutz) in her newest movie. Ben takes Matilda to set every day while Anette stays at home to care for their newborn, and he predictably and without inspiration swerves quickly into torrid affair mode. Anette may be mostly confined to the domestic sphere, but, as the title promises, she is no idiot. She knows everything and plays around with that information Gone Girl-style, revealing her scummy husband for what he really is.
Ridley is solid as Anette, but she also steals the show from the supposed superstar seductress Alicia, and it leaves the impression that the the film might have worked better had the actresses’ roles been reversed. After all, Ridley’s much closer to that A-list status than Lutz (Revenge), and given that her Star Wars work has actually engendered plenty of disturbing parasocial relationships among viewers, that meta later could have added a bit to our understanding of the allure Alicia casts with regard to Ben. The element of the affair that works best in Magpie is its presentation via digital distancing (something that also plays into the film’s twist ending); aside from a movie night at Alicia’s house with Matilda present, their affair occurs entirely through texts. They flirt just to flirt, but none of it fully lights up with desire. They sext, sort of, but it’s not sexy. Instead, there’s something palpably sad about their affair, a feeling underlined by its digital mediation.
But there isn’t a lot of nuance to be found elsewhere. Magpie is a certified “good for her!” movie, and that means that Ben is a full stop big bag of shit, and the film’s conclusion troublingly conflates his regular old shitiness with abusiveness. From what we can piece together from Anette’s reaction, she hasn’t seen this behavior before, and her spitefulness toward her husband has different origins: his inattentiveness, his frequent absences as a father and husband, his pretend-writer lifestyle, even his mannerisms. And while there is something to be said about the shitty-to-abusive-partner pipeline, conflating the two risks de-centering actual abuse.
Zooming out a bit, the thing about the “good for her!” subgenre (Promising Young Woman, Revenge) is that it celebrates the trade-off of romantic revenge, including but not limited to murder, for moral integrity as the victim becomes the perpetrator of said violence. Even if one believes there can be such thing as a just war (or just violence), and even if the creeps at the receiving end of said violence deserve their comeuppance in theory, films that take a celebratory tenor in detailing such narrative still feel wrongheaded. In Magpie, Ben complains to his new flame about his wife’s craziness, mentioning pills Anette didn’t take one morning. To Ben, she’s the wicked witch threatening his new romance. But what she does in response to the circumstance is… well, crazy! In execution, it’s certainly more in line with a classic femme fatale type than reflecting a clever, domestic reversal of that character type, and that’s an unfortunate development for the Anette. Of course, nothing she does can ever justify Ben putting his hands on her (or Alicia), but that sits alongside the question of what exactly and how much was gained through her gaslighting, deception, and manipulation.
And Magpie‘s ending adds to this essential problem. Ben appears to die in a car crash, giving him the ending viewers have been coerced to “desire” while letting Anette off the hook for her crimes. It’s an age-old trick of how to construe the viewer’s empathy for or against the main characters, even more pronounced here because his death comes immediately after the reveal of what exactly Anette has been up to, with the edit specifically connecting his death and his infidelity. The fact that the viewer doesn’t need to like Ben or even feel bad for him for Magpie to leave a bad taste is a pretty damning indictment of the film’s governing mode of manipulation.
DIRECTOR: Sam Yates; CAST: Daisy Ridley, Shazad Latif, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Pippa Bennett-Warner; DISTRIBUTOR: SHOUT! STUDIOS; IN THEATERS: October 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
