Magi (2016)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Her sister Marla (Brianne Davis) has invited American journalist Olivia Watkins (Lucie Pohl) for a visit to her home in Turkey. Marla’s freshly divorced, very pregnant, and seems to carry some kind of hidden burden she won’t quite explain to Olivia. She does tell a creepy tale about a dress she owns that apparently once belonged to a pregnant village girl that was murdered, her baby cut from her womb. What she’s trying to say with it, Olivia isn’t sure, and Marla’s not telling. But then, Marla’s life in Turkey seems to be the kind of weird that makes a woman rather blithe about creepy, icky looking occult ritual stuff just turning up on a table.

Marla’s story must have been important, though, for just the very same night, she is killed with the help of CGI flies with half-human faces, her baby also cut from her womb, as in the story. The police very quickly decide Marla’s ex-husband is responsible for the deed, what with him committing suicide and leaving a vague yet creepy letter just shortly after Marla has been killed. Olivia’s not completely convinced, though, for there’s no trace of Marla’s dead baby to be found, and little about the murder makes sense.

So Olivia starts an investigation of her own, assisted by Marla’s colleagues and friends Emir (Kenan Ece) and Suzan (Emine Meyrem), during which she stumbles upon the trail of a cult attempting to produce human/djinn crossbreeds. She is quickly beset by a variety of supernatural occurrences, reaching from nightmares to djinn attacks. On the plus side, she’ll also find help from cameoing guest stars Michael “Exposition Machine” Madsen and Stephen “The Exorcist” Baldwin.

In most every aspect, Hasan Karacadag’s (who is also the director of the long-running – and long - Dabbe series of horror films) Magi is a messy movie. It’s longer than it needs to be, shifts protagonists at the strangest moments, changes horror sub-genres repeatedly, and throws a somewhat insane amount of worldbuilding and backstory at its viewers. It is, however, exactly this messiness that makes Magi a worthwhile and often surprisingly fun movie, its messiness also making it unpredictable and giving it a whiff of creative madness. So while it is too long from a standpoint of effective and efficient dramaturgy, it certainly never is boring.

A part of the film’s considerable charm is Karacadag’s willingness to add extraneous detail to everyone and everything, climaxing in a scene in which Madsen exposits via a slide show about the cult that includes the occult roots of Nazism, elements of Eastern and Western occult traditions, various religions, the question of who gave birth to Satan, djinns, and conspiracy elements, the film clearly having understood that adding more occult weirdness makes everything in a horror movie better. The film also – surprisingly, really – makes an honest attempt at using all these elements afterwards (and before) the big exposition sequence, never shying away from making things needlessly yet awesomely complicated. There are even nods towards The X-Files.

On a stylistic level, Karacadag is alas a friend of that desaturated colour scheme most filmmakers right now have left behind for trying to make their stuff look like it was shut by Dean Cundey (in other words awesome), but he is loading so much stuff into his grey and beige frames, I nearly didn’t notice. For when it comes to horror sequences, Magi likes to copy other films’ and filmmakers’ approaches rather obviously, but again Karacadag seems to like, quote and borrow from so many different films and stylistic approaches, the film doesn’t feel like a series of stolen bits and pieces from other films so much as it does like a series of awesome, excited and exciting moments. There are set-ups clearly made with J-horror in mind, with the The Conjuring movies, with The Exorcist, there’s a use of bad CGI like in cheap contemporary Indonesian fare or certain Bollywood horror films from half a decade ago, a couple shots basically directly out of Paranormal Activity, a short trip into a parallel dimension made out of even more bad yet imaginative CGI, scenes shot in the style of Industrial Rock videos from the early 00s, a short trip into folk horror. There’s clearly nothing Karacadag doesn’t have in his trick bag; and certainly nothing he isn’t willing to use.


In theory, all this borrowing from obvious, successful sources could, perhaps should, lead to a tepid, copyist kind of horror film, but in practice, Magi feels much too excited and excitable, throwing all kinds of tricks at its audience in a way that feels generous much more than it feels derivative. The whole thing left me with the feeling of having watched a movie just terribly excited by being all other horror movies at once, and for most of its running time I found myself sharing in its excitement pretty enthusiastically.