Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

Sebastián Silva

Here you will find all of our reviews, interviews, and podcasts on the work of writer-director-actor Sebastián Silva.

At Seventh Row, we are long time fans of Sebastián Silva's work, dating back to The Maid (2009). We interviewed him about Magic Magic in 2014, and we have reviewed Nasty Baby and Rotting in the Sun.

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Sundance 2023 Ep.6: Passages,You Hurt My Feelings, Rotting in the Sun, and more.

In the sixth episode (and third dispatch) of the Sundance 2023 podcast season, we discuss highlights like Ira Sachs’s film Passages, Nicole Holofcener’s film You Hurt My Feelings, Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, and Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, as well as other buzzed-about films at the festival.

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Film stills from Agnus MacLachlan's film A Little Prayer, Ira Sachs's film Passages, Nicole Holofcener's film You Hurt My Feelings, Sebastián Silva's film Rotting in the Sun.
Film stills, clockwise from top left: Still from Agnus MacLachlan’s film A Little Prayer, Ira Sachs’s film Passages, Nicole Holofcener’s film You Hurt My Feelings, Sebastián Silva’s film Rotting in the Sun. Stills courtesy of the Sundance Institute.
Films on the podcast include Rotting in the Sun

Listen to the whole Sundance 2023 season

Today is the sixth of seven episodes of the 2023 Sundance season of the Seventh Row podcast.

Sundance 2023 ran from January 19-28, and we have covered this year’s festival in a new podcast season about the films this year and how the programming fits into the festival’s history.

Listen to all the episodes to discover the year’s best and worst films, and how this year’s program jives with past festivals.

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About this episode: Sundance 2023 highlights like the films You Hurt My Feelings, Rotting in the Sun, Passages, A Little Prayer, and more buzzed-about films

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 01:10 Brief thoughts on Fremont, Infinity Pool, Bad Behaviour, Rye Lane, Drift, A Thousand and One
  • 39:20 You Hurt My Feelings by Nicole Holofcener
  • 52:04 Rotting in the Sun by Sebastián Silva
  • 1:04:22 Passages by Ira Sachs
  • 1:21:55 A Little Prayer by Angus MacLachlan
  • 1:33:30 Fair Play, Cat Person, and the legacy of Promising Young Woman
  • 1:54:49 Sundance bingo

In this episode, we discuss four of our favourite films of Sundance 2023, each in the Premieres section: Nicole Holofcener’s dreamed, You Hurt My Feelings, Sebastián Silva’s black comedy Rotting in the Sun, Ira Sachs’ relationship drama Passages, and Angus MacLachlan’s quietly insightful family drama. We also talk briefly about the disappointing films that have forged themselves in the image of Promising Young Woman: Fair Play and Cat Person. Orla discusses one of her most hated films of the festival, Infinity Pool, and Alex defends Alice Englert’s troubled feature debut Bad Behaviour. Alex also adds her thoughts on Fremont, which Orla first discussed in episode 3 (Alex agrees it’s excellent).

Finally, we both discuss some minor highlights of the festival. We were underwhelmed by British rom-com Rye Lane, though think it’s a good depiction of the city. Alex liked Anthony Chen’s (Ilo Ilo and Wet Season) English-language debut Drift, starring Cynthia Erivo and Alia Shawkat, despite its problematic script, because the direction and performances were so good (Honor Swinton-Byrne also shows up!). Orla also weighs in on the US Grand Jury Prize Winner One Thousand Nights.

When/where will you be able to watch the films?

Infinity Pool is currently in cinemas in Canada and the US. Mubi has picked up worldwide rights to Passages, which it will likely release later this year. Sony Pictures Classics (and Mongrel Media in Canada) has picked up the US rights for the film A Little Prayer. We expect a fall release with some fall festival play, and perhaps an Oscar campaign for David Strathairn. A24 already had the rights to Nicole Holofcener’s film You Hurt My Feelings, which we expect will likely be a summer release in the US and Canada. Netflix paid 20 million dollars for Fair Play, which given the positive response at the festival (even if we thought it was bad) will likely mean a fall release. Focus Features has the rights to A Thousand and One which we now expect to be Oscar campaigned with a fall release.

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The Seventh Row Podcast spotlights under-the-radar, female-directed, and foreign films. All of our episodes are carefully curated. Indeed, we only discuss films we think are really worth your time and deserve in-depth critical analysis.

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How to follow our Sundance 2023 coverage

Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on the 2023 Sundance podcast season and coverage on the website.

Follow Seventh Row on Twitter and Instagram @SeventhRow; Alex Heeney on Twitter and Instagram @bwestcineaste; and Orla Smith on Twitter and Instagram.

Show Notes on the E6 of the Sundance 2023 podcast season: Passages, You Hurt My Feelings, Rotting in the Sun, A Little Prayer, and more

Related episodes to films discussed in E6, including Passages, You Hurt My Feelings, Rotting in the Sun, A Little Prayer, and more

All of our podcasts that are more than six months old are only available to members. We also regularly release members only bonus episodes. Many of the episodes listed here are now only available to members (Members Only).

Discover all of our past podcast episodes on films that screened at Sundance.

Episodes related to the Franz Rogowski in the film Passages

  • Ep. 5: Christian Petzold’s Transit (MEMBERS ONLY): Franz Rogowski, who stars in the film Passages, is one of the best actors working today. Head back to one of our earliest episodes where we discuss his amazing (best of the decade) performance in one of the best films of the decade.
  • Ep. 119: Mike Leigh’s Naked (FREE — soon becoming MEMBERS ONLY): There are very few good cinematic depictions of narcissists. Ira Sachs’s Passages is the latest entry into the canon, and the narcissist at its centre, played by Franz Rogowski, reminded us of Johnny (David Thewlis) from Mike Leigh’s Naked, if much less sympathetic (and yet less abusive).

Episodes about Ben Whishaw, co-star of Passages

  • Ep. 69: Paddington and Paddington 2 (MEMBERS ONLY): Ben Whishaw was at Sundance this year with two new movies: Alice Englert’s film Bad Behaviour (as a cult leader) and Ira Sachs’s film Passages (as a man married to Franz Rogowski who cheats on him with a woman). We celebrated Whishaw’s work in both Paddington films, and his prowess as an actor more generally, in this discussion that concludes Paddington is the ultimate symbol of British colonialism.
  • Bonus ep. 25: This is Going to Hurt (MEMBERS ONLY): Ben Whishaw is one of the very best working actors today. With two films at Sundance coming out later this year (hopefully!), now is a great time to visit his tour de force career best work as the lead of This is Going To Hurt, a show about physician mental health in the NHS. His performance is both comic and dramatic and absolutely heartbreaking. It’s also so incredibly detailed. Nobody else could do it like him.

Related episodes to the films A Little Prayer, Rotting in the Sun, and You Hurt My Feelings.

  • Ep. 40: Remembering dead mothers in Stories We Tell, Louder Than Bombs, and Mouthpiece (MEMBERS ONLY): A Little Prayer is a film very much about the family as an ecosystem and a unit of people trying their best under difficult circumstances and often screwing. That’s also what Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs (2015) is about, and we discuss it in depth in this episode. Louder Than Bombs is also about what happens to a family when a major secret has been kept and comes out, wreaking some havoc, just as in the film You Hurt My Feelings.
  • Ep. 94: HBO’s Looking (MEMBERS ONLY): It’s not often that we get media that is unabashedly gay, depicting gay spaces and the gay community in a way that might make heterosexuals uncomfortable. HBO’s Looking was pioneer for this on TV, including the way it depicted gay sex and intimacy. Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun also pushes the envelope, though in a much more confronting (and depressing) way.

Related episodes to Cat Person and Fair Play

  • Ep. 73: Explorations of rape culture in Promising Young Woman and The Assistant (MEMBERS ONLY): Fair Play and Cat Person at Sundance this year feel like poor attempts to ride the Promising Young Woman hype. Revisit our original bashing of Promising Young Woman for context about why we think its approach to addressing sexual assault is really problematic. We compare it to The Assistant which was way better and also screened at Sundance that year, a much subtler and smarter approach to the topic.
  • Bonus ep. 16: Watching Lena Dunham’s Girls in 2021 (MEMBERS ONLY): Lena Dunham was a pioneer of uncomfortable sex scenes involving women in the their 20s, and films like Promising Young Woman, Cat Person, and Fair Play have picked up the baton (if not reached Dunham’s heights). In this episode, we discussed what it was like to watch Girls in 2021 (for the first time for Orla).

Listen to all the related episodes. Become a member.

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Speakers on this episode

Host Alex Heeney is the Editor-in-Chief of Seventh Row. Find her on Twitter @bwestcineaste.

Host Orla Smith is the Executive Editor of Seventh Row. Find her on Instagram @orla_p_smith.

Episode transcript

The transcript for the free excerpt of this episode was AI-generated by Otter.ai.

[fusebox_transcript]

Listen to the Sundance 2023 season

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Director Sebastián Silva on his psychological thriller Magic Magic

Magic Magic, Sebastian Silva, Sebastián Silva
Photo by Pamela Gentile, courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

For the last two weeks, Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva has been in San Francisco as the Winter 2014 Artist in Residence with the San Francisco Film Society, talking about his craft with high school and college students, as well as other filmmakers. He also gave a Q&A at a special screening of his most recent film, Magic Magic, a psychological thriller about a young woman, Alicia (Juno Temple), who goes to visit her cousin in Chile, and finds herself surrounded by her cousin’s unwelcoming boyfriend (Sebastian’s real-life brother, Agustin Silva), his sister, and his closeted friend (Michael Cera). The Seventh Row sat down with Silva earlier this week to discuss making “Magic Magic”, his body of work, and what he’s got coming up on the horizon.

Seventh Row (7R): Where did the idea for Magic Magic come from?

Sebastián Silva): It’s more disturbing than horrifying. I thought about movies that had disturbed me. There is a very exquisite disturbance that early Polanski movies produced in me, like Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. I wanted to rescue that tone, the sense of really awful tragedy together with a grotesque sense of humour.

What is really terrifying to me is losing my mental abilities, that my mind would take over and would control me and not the other way around. A clinical case of paranoid schizophrenia is something I’m pretty scared of. Everyone tapped into paranoiac episodes when making the film. Like, what if you smoked a joint when it wasn’t the right time to smoke it? Or, you’re at a party where you don’t know anybody, and you feel very intimidated and insecure. Now imagine that growing exponentially and how scary that could be. For me, Magic Magic is really a fable. I’m not trying to make people believe it’s reality.

7R: How did you decide how the film would begin?

Sebastián Silva: I feel like movies can really start anywhere: you’re always starting in the middle of something. We needed Alicia (Juno Temple) to arrive in Santiago and to know that she is coming from the US to visit her cousin [Emily Browning]. We wanted to see her arriving with bags, to make it very visual, so people really understand, even though it’s a really short beginning, that she’s coming from somewhere else. To start with Michael [Cera] dancing like a creep in slow motion was an idea that came up on the spot, to just make it a little more interesting and not just have Alicia in the car with the bags arriving.

7R: But we don’t see Brink’s face, only his shoes and then the rest of his body. And the first thing we see of the other characters are their feet and legs.

Sebastián Silva: That was an idea that the DP, Christopher Doyle, and I built together. We wanted Alicia’s face to be the first face you see, to be as visual as possible, and as direct as possible, that this is our main character: this is who the movie is going to be about. They’re waiting for her. She shows up. We haven’t seen anybody’s face, and then we see Alicia’s.

7R: How did you think about whose perspective you were shooting from? It’s very eerie.

Sebastián Silva: The film switches back and forth between Alicia’s and Brink’s [Michael Cera] perspective. That was something we really thought about. It was really important that there would be this ambiguity about whether Alicia is losing her mind, or the people around her are being really sadistic to her. The point of view switches from the character of Brink to the character of Alicia, so you’re not really sure what is the story that is being told.

That helps create a place that is not really safe for an audience. They don’t know whether it’s a comedy, a drama, a psychological thriller, or a horror film. We were also playing with Alicia’s perception, that she would see stuff that wasn’t there. When she thinks that Barbara [Catalina Sandino Moreno] was staring at her, the audience could also think that Barbara was doing that — it makes sense that she would be doing that — but then she wasn’t actually. The point of view is sort of unclear, to me, in this movie, and it was purposely made that way so the audience would never feel really safe.

Sebastian Silva, Magic Magic
Juno Temple stars in Sebastian Silva’s MAGIC MAGIC. Photo by Andres Gachon, courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

7R: How do you approach building characters with actors?

Sebastián Silva: It depends on the movie. Sometimes I have a very clear idea of what I want the characters to be. In Magic Magic, Brink is a very particularly constructed character, almost like a cartoon character. But for most of my other films, like Crystal Fairy and The Maid, I have picked actors that already somewhat resemble the characters they will be playing. So I let them sort of be themselves. And then I give them broad directions physically, like move a little faster.

I feel like Jamie [Michael Cera], in Crystal Fairy, moves a little faster than Michael Cera. I told him to use his voice and speak faster; everything, do it faster, as if you were more anxious. He moves very similarly to Michael, but somehow faster. But there wasn’t much to construct, I feel. My brothers were playing themselves. Gaby Hoffman was playing Crystal Fairy, but at the same time Gaby has a lot of Crystal Fairy-ish qualities.

7R: You decided to use a score in Magic Magic.

Sebastián Silva: Magic Magic and Life Kills Me are my only movies that have a score. So far, I’ve been really purist about what movies need a score and what movies don’t and why. If this is a very realistic movie, it shouldn’t have score. Old Cats and The Maid had no score, only incidental music coming from a source. That started changing with Crystal Fairy, which has a lot of incidental music, both coming from a source in the film and not.

7R: Why were you such a purist about it?

Sebastián Silva: Music really enters people’s bodies and affects their emotions differently than visual stuff and narrative. It’s an element you have to be really careful with because it’s so strong. You really need to know what you’re doing with it. It’s there to be used, and I think it takes a lot of balls to risk how you use it.

A movie with no music at all, if it has good performances, it’s safe. But if you decide to add music, you are risking over-doing stuff or underestimating your audience’s understanding of the emotions that you’re portraying. They might think that you’re helping them too much or that you’re leading them somewhere they were not going. But I think it’s a risk worth taking. It’s one more element to use to create emotions.

7R: What are you working on now?

Sebastián Silva: I’m finishing up a film called Nasty Baby right now. It’s improvised like Crystal Fairy, but the outline was a little longer: 25 pages instead of 12. But all the dialogue is improvised. We shot it in Brooklyn with two hand-held cameras, and I worked with the DP I worked with for The Maid, Old Cats, and my first movie. I’m also acting in it, and directing from within the scenes, which was a new experience and really gratifying.

7R: This is your first film made outside of Chile.

Sebastián Silva: I’d been living in the US for 10 years when I made Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy. I went to Chile to make them, but I was living in the States already. I made this HBO thing that I shot in New York called The Boring Life of Jacqueline, and it’s all in English — no subtitles, nothing to do with Chile. Crystal Fairy and Magic Magic are some kind of a blend: location-wise, they’re in Chile, but language-wise, they’re 80-90% in English. 

I’m in Nasty Baby, and I have an accent, and so is my brother: we speak Spanish to each other in it. So there is a tiny sprinkle of my nationality in it, but i think this is probably the last one I’ll do that in. I don’t think Chile will be in any of my movies anymore. I just feel like it’s been enough.

Listen to our review of Sebastian Silva’s new film, Rotting in the Sun, which premiered at Sundance 2023. >>