Sorcery: a richly rendered story of anticolonial score-settling in 19th-century Chile

• Reviewed from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

If revenge is a dish well served cold, Christopher Murray’s Sorcery posits that it’s even better when infused with the righteous fury of a colonised people. Rosa (played by newcomer Valentina Véliz Caileo) is an indigenous teen in 19^th-century Chile who seeks justice after her employer, a German colonist farmer, forces her (and us) to watch her father being torn apart by a pack of dogs for a small perceived transgression. The brutality is not isolated: across the land – that is to say, Chiloé Island, off the coast of southern Chile – the indigenous population is subjected to near-unwatchable levels of cruelty.

Having witnessed this particular aspect of the colonial mindset, Rosa rejects Christianity and returns to her culture’s spiritual roots. She joins a group called Recta Provincia, led by a middle-aged man named Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), and embraces a world of witchcraft and resistance, going on to be mentored by a witch played by the darkly enigmatic Neddiel Muñoz Millalonco. The film draws on real events that took place on Chiloé Island, but defies easy classification; as well as being a revenge tale, it dabbles in magical realism, folk horror and fairytale iconography. At several points, it evokes some of the colonial horrors seen in Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016) and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018). However, its elegant compositions – desaturated, seemingly lit by the cold light of day – never seem like homages to other films, but rather keenly specific to the culture and storytelling tradition that colonial forces sought to suppress. Murray wrote the script with Chilean writer Pablo Paredes, who has previously dug into Chile’s storied history with TV series El Reemplazante (2012-14) and films Matar a Pinochet (2020) and La Mirada Incendiada (2021). Paredes’s knowledge of and connection to the material come across in dialogue that is never overstated but nonetheless palpably drips with outrage.

Rosa’s coming of age is a hero’s journey for which she did not ask, but Caileo plays her with such subtlety and grace that the transformation is seamless. Likewise, the themes of female empowerment, grief, magic and mayhem all overlap smoothly, speaking to the complexity of acknowledging and rejecting one’s colonial occupation.

As a tale of revenge, Sorcery satisfies, but in many respects, whether or not the cruel German farmer meets a brutal demise is the film’s least interesting element; at most, it’s part of a much larger narrative. Far more emotional terrain is covered by Rosa’s journey itself, and her gradual realisation that she need not define herself solely against colonisers.