A 13-year-old girl is subjected to an abrupt education in the brutality of colonial power abuses and in arcane tools of resistance in Chilean director Christopher Murray’s fifth feature Sorcery, screening in the Horizons section at Karlovy Vary after its world premiere at Sundance. Rosa (Valentina Veliz Caleo) is a Huilliche, whose people had long inhabited Chiloe Island off the coast of Chile before the encroachment of Europeans. It’s 1880, and she has cast aside her own culture to take on Christian beliefs and rituals, in an effort to adapt to life as a servant in a household of German settlers. But, when ruthless farmer Stefan (Sebastian Hulk) blames her people for a blight of illness killing the family’s sheep, and sets dogs on her father to maul him to pieces, the appalling act of violence sparks an existential crisis within her. Discovering that neither the church nor the state and their self-serving representatives will come to her aid in her quest for justice for the murder, she realises an alternate source of power will be needed for protection, and she begins to reconnect with her own identity.
Pablo Larrain, a consummate hand at portraying Chile’s past at its darkest, is attached as a producer to Sorcery, which transports us not into the military dictatorship of the ‘70s and ‘80s but to reckon with lesser-known power abuses of the nineteenth century. Murray’s framing of this very political story maximises its universal, allegorical appeal. While having a basis in actual events, it leans into genre tropes to effectively summon up the eerie, atmospheric suspense of a supernatural witchcraft fable. Chilote folklore is harnessed to immerse us in a brooding tale of anti-colonial retribution that should hook in horror and history buffs alike.
The dank, moss-covered forests, grey skies and cool, austere shores of Chiloe, impressively captured by D.O.P. Maria Secco, set a powerful and forbidding tone, supported by an atonal strings score, and ominous, portentous touches such as circling flocks of black birds. Veliz Caileo plays Rosa with a stoic composure that befits a young woman who learns to channel her rage and sorrow with formidable intention. She seeks help from two powerful settler men on the island, the duplicitous mayor Acevedo (Francisco Nunez), who is looking for a way to escape this wild outpost, and the local priest, but both determine to overlook the role of humans in her father’s death, at the risk of compromising themselves and weakening their corrupt influence. A greater shot at recourse and action comes when she is taken in by an older, gruff Huilliche, Mateo (Daniel Antivilo). Having experienced a lot when it comes to the workings of the island, he is wary to expose her to too much risk. But he can’t hold back her headstrong nature when she discovers he practices strange healing rituals, and that he heads La Recta Provincia, an underground rebel movement safeguarding native rights and self-governance in the face of a dirty-dealing, punitive court that claims dominion over all island inhabitants, whether they recognise its laws and judgments or not. An introduction to Aurora (Neddiel Munoz Millalonco), a woman well-versed in the forest’s secrets, sparks Rosa’s initiation.
It is rumoured that the island’s indigenous people are shape-shifters, able to transmute themselves and others into animals. When Stefan’s young sons vanish in mysterious, hair-raising circumstances, full settler fury (replete with a bloody beach torture scene) is unleashed. The indefinite contours of shifting identity are an evocative dialogue refrain, and an unsettling visual ingredient in a magic practice that amps up from plaited rope-braids to human skins. Rosa uses the dismissive settler perception of her as “just an Indian” for cover, as she schemes to avenge her father and secure Mateo’s release from custody. As erasure of culture and memory is the colonial weapon here, to see and be seen clearly comes to mean liberation.
An actual legend from Chiloe, about a sorcery duel between a Basque navigator and a local healer, which led to a book of European spells ending up in indigenous hands, is incorporated into the narrative of Rosa’s quickly expanding knowledge. Beyond any thrilling esoteric dimension, Sorcery is as much about its young heroine’s growing sense of ancestral belonging and self-actualisation in the face of a boundless grief she refuses to let consume her future. It works its charms well on the level of conventional horror, while ultimately being much more: a tale of political awakening and maturing agency, in a battle against patriarchal and ethnic oppression.
Director: Christopher Murray
Writers: Christopher Murray, Pablo Paredes
Producers: Juan de Dios Larrain, Pablo Larrain, Rocio Jadue, Nicolas Celis
Editor: Paloma Lopez
Cinematography: Maria Secco
Cast: Valentina Veliz Caileo, Daniel Antivilo, Sebastian Hulk, Daniel Munoz, Neddiel Munoz Millalonco
Art direction: Patricia Pardo
Production design: Bernadita Baeza
Music: Leonardo Heiblum
Production companies: Fabula (Chile), Match Factory Productions (Germany), Pimienta Films (Mexico)
Sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Horizons)
In German, Mapudungan, Spanish
101 minutes
