By David Dent
Christopher Murray’s elegiac, meandering film, set in 19th Century Chile, carefully and menacingly sets out the relationship between the indigenous Huilliche people of the region and their colonisers.
After a mysterious incident results in a flock of sheep dying, the animals owned by a German landowner and his wife, the couple point the finger of blame at the father of a young Chilean girl, Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) and set their dogs on him.
After his death Rosa, orphaned and distraught, is taken in by village elder Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), the nominal head of a group, Recta Provincia, whose ways embrace old practices and, arguably, witchcraft. She is tutored by a supposed witch, Aurora (Neddiel Muñoz Millalonco).
Meanwhile revenge has reared its ugly head with the subsequent abduction of the German landowners’ sons, Thorsten (Matías Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers). Suspicion as to their fate – were they turned into dogs in a fitting magickal response to the killing of Rosa’s father? – turns attention to Mateo, and the resultant trial (apparently based on true events) seeks to establish confessions of witchcraft from the members of Recta Provincia.
Sorcery is about lots of things, but mainly the impact of colonisation and the fight to keep belief alive. While nothing is categorically proven in the film, there’s a strong suggestion that the ways of the Recta Provincia are supernaturally derived, and both more powerful than the biased rage of the colonisers, and ultimately more persuasive.
Murray’s film unfolds slowly, natural light and elements suffusing everything in gloom (Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch is a good comparator both thematically and stylistically). It doesn’t all work – there’s arguably too much guesswork to be done by the audience – but Véliz Caileo is startlingly good as Rosa in her debut performance.
Sorcery is screening now in UK cinemas.
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