We’ve seen a lot of recent fantasy movies and series that tend to fall into all the tropes of development. young adultsespecially the recent ‘LockWood Academy’ or the saga ‘Fantastic Animals and How to Find Them’ and they usually have codes that begin to be repeated to the detriment of what makes them work in literature, for this reason ‘The Magic Door’, which opens this Friday in Spain, manages to make people believe in the genre again.
Based on Tom Holt’s novel of the same name, the film is directed by Jeffrey Walker and stars Patrick Gibson, Sophie Wilde, Sam Neill and Christoph Waltz and is a great urban fantasy film surprise thanks to how well told it is. Instead of focusing on special effects and explaining a heavy and complex mythology, he shows unusual patience in presenting his world little by little, with great care in his characters and in the small daily dilemmas that make his personal story more important than the adventures they are going to live.
A labor satire in times of unemployment and crisis
One of the keys is the script, written by Leon Ford, who adapts the first book of Holt’s seven-part series is that he has no interest in compressing more stories than it serves the purpose of the center of the story, the life of Paul. Carpenter and Sophie Pettingel, two interns with financial problems (a normalized look at precarious youth that this type of fiction usually lacks) who start working at a mysterious London firm called JW Wells & Co. Although they soon discover that their employers are not ordinary businessmen, but magical beings, their story together is the most important thing in the film, from how it begins to how it ends at the end. final.
Everything else is random though the central core of the story seems to be the mysteries of the company and how they are using modern corporate strategies to disrupt the ancient world of magic. Paul and Sophie find themselves in the middle of a conflict between Humphrey Wells, the company’s charismatic CEO, and Dennis Tanner, a ruthless middle manager, who have different plans for the future of the world.
The references to the work of JK Rowling may be obvious, but in reality the world posed is full of the magic of Michael Ende, CS Lewis, the Terry Gilliam of ‘Brazil’ and even the gentle terrors of RL Stine. ‘The Magic Door’ is a modest film, directed to the Sky platform, but its invoice is designed for the big screen, and in addition to a world with secret dimensions, dimensional teleportation and other ideas that break the gray world of an automated London, along the way the protagonists meet goblins, dragons and other fantastic creatures.
A strange, light and very British romantic fantasy
Unlike the CGI invasion that fills the screens, the appearances are reduced to small moments in which the fantastic world invades reality, until its end, in which some goblins appear as in Roald Dahl’s ‘The Witches’ and show us in great creations and makeup by Jim Henson Co, as the film is a co-production between the company and Story Bridge Films, and features some traditional puppets and animatronics reminiscent of monstrous moments from his dark 80s movies, like ‘Inside the Labyrinth’.
‘The magic door’ is one of those premieres that are not announced as a great event, and that are perceived as dispensable events, but It is not so easy to find a film of this genre of almost two hours that go by in a flash. Always funny and moving, it combines fantasy and comedy with a touch of satire and plays with the idea of dimensions through doors and into its final part, with great ideas that seem to extend the premise of ‘House, an amazing house’.
But perhaps its greatest peculiarity is that, under its layer of fantastic adventure, it hides a weird romantic comedy that never loses focus on the adorable story of its protagonists without being too cloying or cheesy, overcoming mechanisms of this type of adaptation to establish itself as a delicious rarity in the panorama of commercial family cinema. If there is a possible downside, it is that it leaves you wanting more, with the feeling of being the pilot of something bigger that it would be a delight to have the opportunity to see developed in the form of a series or trilogy.
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