Review: Sorcery

Director:  Christopher Murray

Stars:  Valentina Véliz Caileo, Daniel Antivilo, Daniel Muñoz

While much of modern Chilean cinema is (justly) preoccupied with the era and legacy of Pinochet, Christopher Murray’s finely realised Sorcery looks back further, to the 1880s, and the German occupation/colonisaton of some of the country’s remote islands. Through the ominous slow-broods of folk horror, he manifests something every bit as eerie and authentic-feeling as Robert Eggers’ rightly venerated The Witch. Sorcery‘s origins may make it that little bit more inaccessible for western audiences, but it ought not be taken for granted and earns itself a place beside Eggers’ modern classic.

As the white family she serves say grace around the morning breakfast table, child servant Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) spies something amiss in the fields outside. The family’s stock of lambs have all died, with evidence on hand to suggest the action was directed by someone – or something – with animosity toward the settlers. When Rosa’s father is unable to explain the occurrence, patriarch Stefan (Sebastian Hülk) looses dogs that maul him to death. Rosa seeks justice, but the ineffectual mayor (Daniel Muñoz), resentful of his position, says only that “dogs don’t go to jail”. Dissatisfied, Rosa seeks out other methods to balance the scales.

It isn’t just land colonised in Sorcery, but spirits. Rosa – an indigenous Hulliche – is devoutly Christian; a religion brought to her by the whites. Yet her race remains her most pressing and defining trait in the eyes of Stefan’s wife Agnes (Annick Durán) who tries to stop the girl placing a cross on her father’s grave. Here, Rosa’s own agency as a converted native person is suppressed. Even as a fellow Christian she is made to feel second-class. An imposter, even. Something which ultimately steers her back to her roots.

Frustrated by her lack of progress, Rosa walks into the ocean. What seems at first like a potential act of self-baptism quickly comes to read as a suicide attempt. Though she is rescued, the undulating visual metaphor for feeling engulfed is clear and evocative, relayed mournfully in Leonardo Heiblum’s sonorous score. Guided by her unlikely saviour, local elder Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), Rosa starts a spiritual journey to some measure of recompense.

This journey ultimately involves shedding those parts of herself inherited from the colonialists, specifically her learned religion. Rosa has her baptism ‘washed away’ by the roaring waterfalls at the heart of the island, the power of which Murray has white-out the screen before contrasting this with the insular darkness of the caves behind. Rosa is on her way toward something older, more earthen, less knowable to the Europeans.

Murray’s pacing is carefully considered (i.e. slow), but his methodology is steady and hypnotic. Bound up in a haunting sound design, the film often feels as though it is emerging out of darkness before you, as though being presented from some liminal realm separated from our own by gossamer fabric. In this it evokes the likes of Hungary’s austere master György Fehér. Via Rosa we observe mysterious rituals taking place in the island’s forests involving the same coarse ropes that circles the necks of the dead lambs, connecting the two, suggestive of a wider conspiracy and network of retaliation.

Come the end, an act of charity from the local community isn’t enough to restore faith in the minds of the settlers and the imbalance between the races is at its clearest. But Sorcery is about all sorts of schisms, often vocalised against Rosa, who is by turns dismissed for her values, religion, age and gender. Murray’s film pits the world against her at every compass point, making her seem like an island in the midst of a perpetually raging sea.