The trans­portive beau­ty of mod­ern mag­i­cal realism

In mag­i­cal real­ist fam­i­lies, real­i­ty flick­ers. For as long as I can remem­ber, cer­tain rel­a­tives car­ried a fre­net­ic charge, punc­tu­at­ing the usu­al banal­i­ties of the con­ver­sa­tions of fam­i­ly get-togeth­ers with warn­ings and pre­mo­ni­tions or news from beyond. Our dead weren’t else­where (up above, down below, or wher­ev­er their cor­po­ral forms lay), but all around us, all the time – the spi­der that lives on your win­dowsill, the but­ter­fly that lands on your hand, the angel­ic form sit­ting on your aunt’s sofa you’re told not to crowd. All sym­bols become man­i­fest as the bound­aries are blurred between liv­ing and dead, past and present and real and imag­ined – sig­ni­fy­ing the work of col­lec­tive pro­cess­ing span­ning generations.

Of course, much before mag­i­cal real­ism was canon­ised in artis­tic forms, cul­tures the world over have always been involved in their own myth­mak­ing in this way. But the lan­guage of mag­i­cal real­ism was at first pop­u­larised as a lit­er­ary genre to process the con­flict-torn Latin Amer­i­ca of the 1940s – by look­ing ahead to two upcom­ing exam­ples, Andrea Arnold’s Eng­land-set Bird and Rungano Nyoni’s Zam­bia-set On Becom­ing A Guinea Fowl, it’s now clear that mag­i­cal real­ism in art has since tak­en flight and gone global.

The mag­ic real­ist frame­work offers up an alter­nate sys­tem of real­i­ty that maps onto our exist­ing one with­out dis­plac­ing it – it treats mag­ic as part of every­day life, accept­ed with­out ques­tion by its characters.

Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez – the Colom­bian writer inar­guably the most syn­ony­mous with the genre – believed that it was the gaze of the colonis­er which makes the real­i­ty of the colonised unbe­liev­able or fan­tas­ti­cal. This genre, then, along with plat­form­ing mar­gin­alised per­spec­tives, also chal­lenges sta­tus quo ideas around knowledge.

Mag­ic realism’s mer­its as a folk­loric – and polit­i­cal – tool are often under­sung or mis­un­der­stood as fan­ta­sy; but in blend­ing the real with the mag­i­cal, films like Bird and On Becom­ing A Guinea Fowl defa­mil­iarise the every­day and ren­der the extra­or­di­nary pos­si­ble, invit­ing their char­ac­ters (and their audi­ences) to view their world through a dif­fer­ent lens.

In doing so, mag­i­cal realism’s unique val­ue is its abil­i­ty to hold up a mir­ror to our world, urg­ing us to ques­tion what we accept as real. In a con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al ter­rain where pol­i­tics and media serve us uncer­tain truths all the time, mag­i­cal real­ism ges­tures towards the very real dan­gers of tac­it accep­tance and asks us to look again.

The first time we see Franz Rogawl­s­ki as Bird, it feels like a dream. It’s ear­ly morn­ing when Bai­ley (played by superb first-time actor Nykiya Adams) awakes in a field in Kent, hav­ing hid­den there after a teenage vig­i­lante act gone awry. It’s bucol­ic if not for the pow­er lines flank­ing the edges. Bird is warm; Bai­ley is shak­en. She is dis­trust­ful of peo­ple in gen­er­al and, par­tic­u­lar­ly of odd strangers like Bird enjoy­ing the sim­ple plea­sure of the morn­ing light. Bai­ley pulls out her phone to film Bird osten­si­bly for her safe­ty, but it’s almost as if the record­ing will some­how cor­rob­o­rate the exis­tence of the preter­nat­ur­al fig­ure mov­ing towards her.

Bai­ley lives with her sin­gle dad Bug (Bar­ry Keoghan), in a colour­ful­ly worn-down squat, where his pre­oc­cu­pa­tions side­line Bai­ley as she tries to gain a safe foothold of her own in an adult world, forced in between her father’s new fiancée or her mum’s (Jas­mine Job­son) vio­lent­ly misog­y­nist boyfriend.

There’s a lot of change afoot for them through­out: whether it’s Bai­ley get­ting her first peri­od and exper­i­ment­ing with eye­lin­er, or even Bug’s attempt to har­ness the intox­i­cat­ing pow­ers of a poi­so­nous (and expen­sive) toad he’s acquired. Bird, for his part, is look­ing for his estranged father. Bird takes her under his wing, so to speak, although the reci­procity between them speaks to a com­mon under­stand­ing of what it feels like to grow and change, while alone and unseen.

Amongst Arnold’s oeu­vre, the film bears many of the same touch­stones of the social-real­ist milieus in which we usu­al­ly find her char­ac­ters. But here in Bird, the film’s ideas around belong­ing and iden­ti­ty take on a dif­fer­ent form as Arnold turns to mag­i­cal real­ism for the first time. In an intense third-act moment of pro­tec­tion, Bird trans­forms into some­thing resem­bling his name­sake. It’s a beau­ti­ful and messy turn that leaps out of the nat­u­ral­ism we’ve seen up until that moment; besides the injec­tion of just-alright CGI, the height­ened flut­ter of un-real­i­ty allows us to expe­ri­ence a pro­fun­di­ty of feel­ing oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult to grasp through real­ism alone.

From one bird to anoth­er, On Becom­ing A Guinea Fowl also jumps the par­ti­tion of real­ism to arrive at its own emo­tion­al truth. Shu­la (Susan Chardy) is home for her Uncle’s funer­al, join­ing the group of women tasked with funer­al prepa­ra­tions along­side their expect­ed per­for­mance of rit­u­alised grief and mourn­ing. The scars of sex­u­al abuse at the hands of the new­ly deceased begin to chafe, and Shula’s grow­ing under­stand­ing com­pels her to find her voice so that the same pat­tern doesn’t repeat itself. Alas, it’s eas­i­er said than done giv­en the (in this case, gen­er­a­tional) impasse around com­plic­it silence.

The guinea fowl is use­ful to all the ani­mals in the ani­mal king­dom, we learn, as it rings the alarm to sig­nal dan­ger for every­one. As Shu­la chips away at the cul­tur­al mores that have led to the bur­den of secre­cy, the film’s tri­umphant final moments show Shu­la trans­formed – sound­ing the hope­ful death knell for repressed col­lec­tive trau­ma and its con­comi­tant grief.

Both Bird and On Becom­ing A Guinea Fowl present an emo­tion­al over­flow that can’t be addressed head-on, and in each instance, mag­i­cal real­ism does the leg­work to help us weath­er and process what feels unspeak­able. The genre seeks to wedge a door open in accept­ed ​‘ratio­nal­i­ty’, empha­sis­ing instead the valid­i­ty and uni­ver­sal val­ue found in indi­vid­ual or cul­tur­al mem­o­ry and experience.

There was a time on X (Twit­ter) last year when I was briefly obsessed with a now-defunct Mag­i­cal Real­ism bot that spit out a fresh log­line every four hours: ​“At the stroke of mid­night a giant tiger ris­es from the Mediter­ranean sea.” ​“An ancient Roman girl appears on a New York sub­way sta­tion plat­form, and laughs.” Con­sid­er­ing our culture’s vexed rela­tion­ship with truth, is it any sur­prise that we’re ever more drawn to a genre that com­bines real­i­ty with a lit­tle bit of mag­ic? Mag­i­cal real­ism can offer laugh­ter, heal­ing and new modes of know­ing in a con­found­ing world; to recite a well-worn Emi­ly Dick­in­son quote in the 11^th hour: ​‘Hope is the thing with feathers.