Sor­cery – A witch tri­al movie with a mag­i­cal-real­ist twist

I don’t know who you are any­more,” says Agnes (Annick Durán) to Rosa (Valenti­na Vél­iz Caileo) a lit­tle way into Christo­pher Murray’s Sor­cery (Bru­jería). Rosa is not so sure herself.

A 13-year-old maid to Ger­man set­tlers on Chile’s Chiloé Island in 1881, Rosa has con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty, learnt Ger­man and become like her employ­ers – the patri­arch Ste­fan (Sebas­t­ian Hülk), his wife Agnes and their young boys Thorsten (Matías Ban­nis­ter) and Franz (Iker Echev­ers) – whom she regards as her own fam­i­ly Yet when all the sheep on the prop­er­ty are strick­en with a mys­te­ri­ous ill­ness, Ste­fan sus­pects witch­craft, and sets his dogs on Rosa’s father Juan (Fran­cis­co Núñez), killing him.

Unable to give Juan a Chris­t­ian bur­ial, and fail­ing to get jus­tice from either the May­or (Daniel Muñoz) or the Church, Rosa is tak­en in by Mateo (Daniel Antivi­lo), an indige­nous elder with con­nec­tions to the Huil­liche secret soci­ety known as Rec­ta Provin­cia. Sor­cery is both rite of pas­sage and revenge myth, as Rosa, on the cusp of ado­les­cence, looks in the watery mir­ror, or in Mateo’s eyes, and finds her­self. ​“Some peo­ple don’t want to remem­ber,” she is told by Auro­ra Quinchen (Ned­diel Muñoz Mil­lalon­co), ​“but mem­o­ries are plas­tered over every­thing.” Auro­ra ini­ti­ates Rosa into the island’s tra­di­tion­al mag­ic – and so Rosa strips away all the trap­pings of her assim­i­la­tion to colo­nial­ism, and embraces her native inher­i­tance and inner witch.

Mur­ray presents all the shapeshift­ing, body-swap­ping and bale­ful curs­ing in a strict mode of mag­i­cal real­ism where nat­u­ral­ism rules and spe­cial effects are eschewed (apart from the odd appar­ent­ly CGI-tweaked mur­mu­ra­tion). This real­ism is impor­tant: for not only is the film’s sto­ry, co-writ­ten by Mur­ray with Pablo Pare­des, loose­ly based on a real 1880s tri­al of Chiloé indi­genes charged with witch­craft, but the film’s super­nat­ur­al fur­nish­ings serve as metaphors for abo­rig­i­nal identity.

After all, Rosa, on her quest for jus­tice and equal treat­ment, is not only return­ing to her cul­tur­al roots, but also under­go­ing a polit­i­cal rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion, as she sees the wrongs of her colo­nial mas­ters and their com­pro­mised ser­vants, and decides to fight back from her furtive ​“state with­in the state”. Rosa is awak­en­ing not only to her envi­ron­ment, but to the injus­tices built into the pre­vail­ing sys­tem, as well as to her own sta­tus, class, eth­nic­i­ty and hid­den pow­ers. Ulti­mate­ly Sor­cery is a film about land (and water). Mateo implies that Stefan’s flock has been cursed because he built his farm on sacred earth.

Rosa will learn from Mateo that Huil­lich­es like her father ​“aren’t heav­en crea­tures, Huil­lich­es are sea crea­tures”, and she will reverse her Chris­t­ian bap­tism with a more native water cer­e­mo­ny, while dis­cov­er­ing the island’s lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal under­ground in a cave which, as Auro­ra only half-jok­ing­ly sug­gests, is locat­ed with­in her­self. Here the island’s geog­ra­phy and the natives’ mythol­o­gy merge into an over­lap­ping mys­tery which will ulti­mate­ly bring about the young woman’s emer­gent self-knowl­edge, as she meta­mor­phoses into a very dif­fer­ent kind of adult.