The Real and the Unexplained: Magical Realism on Screen

We will explore three evocative films that bring magical realism into the realm of contemporary art cinema: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Happy as Lazzaro (2018) by Alice Rohrwacher, and Undertow (2009) by Javier Fuentes-León. As a bonus, we will also consider The Story of Marie and Julien (2003) by Jacques Rivette—a quietly haunting film that lingers on love, memory, and the quiet return of the dead. Though not a textbook case of magical realism, its calm integration of the supernatural and its elliptical unfolding of time align it closely with the genre’s cinematic logic.

In Uncle Boonmee, spirits return from beyond death—not with terror or wonder, but with familiarity. The ghost of a wife, a son turned into a monkey-creature, and distant echoes of past lives all appear as calmly as a shift in light. Weerasethakul’s cinema listens to the forest, the silence, and the unseen, making space for a worldview in which the supernatural is simply another register of reality.

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Happy as Lazzaro tells the story of a young peasant whose unyielding kindness quietly suspends the laws of time. Rohrwacher renders the miraculous without spectacle, allowing temporal dislocation to unfold with the same naturalism as the rhythms of rural labor and social control. Her camera follows Lazzaro not as a saint or symbol, but as someone who lives entirely in the moment—a life so innocent that time forgets how to move.

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In Undertow, a fisherman’s secret love reappears in ghostly form, gently pressuring the boundaries of a small coastal village. Yet the presence of the dead is not questioned; it is carried, lived with, and mourned as something continuous. Fuentes-León grounds the supernatural in emotion and place, crafting a world where the invisible persists as quietly as the tide.

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Rivette’s The Story of Marie and Julien extends these themes in a more intimate, elliptical register. A woman reappears in a man’s life, their domestic routine unfolding under the weight of something unspoken. The metaphysical is never declared—it merely lingers, like memory, or like someone who never quite left. The film’s calm integration of the supernatural, its spectral logic, and its refusal to explain the impossible align it closely with the genre’s cinematic sensibility. It stands as a quietly haunting epilogue to the main program—where love, time, and the dead are held in unresolved suspension.

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Across these films, the inexplicable is not a departure from reality but a deepening of it. Magical realism here is not fantasy—it is a mode of attention, a way of seeing the world where the line between the real and the unreal is not breached but dissolved.