MAGPIE Review: Daisy Ridley Delivers Knockout Performance in Marital Neo-Noir

When Daisy Ridley (Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Marsh King's Daughter, the Star Wars sequel trilogy) last appeared on screen in Young Woman and the Sea earlier this year, she was literally and figuratively swimming for her life.

She's no longer swimming or anywhere near a large body of water in her latest film, Magpie, but her character, Anette, isn't far from drowning metaphorically if not in real -- or rather, reel -- life. As scripted with surprising, not entirely unwelcome, bluntness by screenwriter Tom Bateman's (Ridley's real-life husband), Anette fails into a familiar category, the woman on the verge of a public and/or private breakdown, of letting slip the thin veneer of societal norms, asserting her singular agency, and acting/reacting against those norms, breaking them -- and possibly herself -- in the process.

How far Anette eventually goes in righting the multitude of perceived wrongs she suffers, mostly at the hands of her self-entitled, navel-gazing, indifferent husband, Ben (Shazad Latif), a writer of mild repute struggling to complete (I.e., start) his latest novel. A legend in his own mind (if not in anyone else's), the man-bun-sporting Ben sees Anette less as an equal partner than a servant-wife and mother to his two children, Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), and their colic-ridden infant son. He's far too busy, far too preoccupied with his obsessive pursuit of art with a capital "A" or, in the brief moments of self-awareness, feeling sorry for himself to recognize the self-made gulf separating him from Anette or Anette's quiet desperation, let alone reciprocate the unqualified devotion she shown her family for more than a decade.

As deftly directed by first-timer Sam Yates with an able assist from production designer Amanda McArthur and cinematographer Laura Bellingham, their comfortable-looking, impossibly large home outside London Anette shares with her family feels suffocatingly claustrophobic and oppressive, the almost visible air throbbing with Anette's bitterness, resentment, and despair.. Its halls, linked rooms, and isolated surroundings represent the debilitating tradeoffs Anette has made in exchange for a socially approved, heteronormative family and regressive, stifling domesticity.

Anette's long disintegrating marriage, however, gets the proverbial kick in the solar plexus when Matilda receives an offer she can't and shouldn't refuse: A role as the daughter of a superficially glamorous movie star, Alicia (Matilda Lutz, Revenge), in a movie production filming nearby. With Ben as an obviously smitten chaperone and Alicia initially welcoming his solicitous, adoring fan behavior, the long, slow slide toward the rapid dissolution of Anette and Ben's marriage gains the kind of inexorable momentum that little if anything, can stop the inevitable breakdown of their relationship.

Playing the Fatal Attraction card, except from the sympathetic perspective of the betrayed wife, Magpie twists and turns its way into thriller, neo-noir territory, focusing on an increasingly obsessive Anette as her suspicions about her husband and Alicia consume her from the inside out and the outside-in. Long ignored, long dismissed as little more than a wife or a mother rather than a fully autonomous human being with her own agency, Anette's willful acts of possible self- and other-destruction rarely feel less than justified given the circumstances. Even as the existential danger grows for anyone in Anette's orbit, our sympathies remain resolutely with Anette, a testament to Bateman's writing, Yates's direction, and Ridley's performance.

While Yates and Bateman leave little room for subtlety in their approach to ideas or themes, Ridley delivers the equivalent of a master class in repression, conveying Anette's turbulent inner state, along with its fracturing, with a grounded, less-is-more approach to her performance as Anette. Whether it's Anette's body language, reacting almost imperceptibly to Ben's slights or indifference, her measured line deliveries, or her shifting facial expressions, Ridley all but disappears into the role of Anette, giving her the life, meaning, and empathy otherwise missing from her relationships.

The film will be released, only in movie theaters, in New York, Los Angeles, and select cities on Friday, October 25, via Shout Studios.