Magic Hour 2026 Movie Review
Went to a Q&A screening at IFC, my first time there. I randomly came across it when I was on a random walk actually, there’s so many theatres around the union square-Washington square park area. One of the few theaters I’ve been to where the internet actually works inside the auditorium. Also, compared to AMC or Regal, they seemed way more organized when it came to lining people up for special screenings.
As for the movie itself, I didn’t like it much. I didn’t like any of the characters, which is an issue when the entire premise revolves around a marriage and you’re supposed to care about the relationship. Because of that, all the emotional or heated moments felt pretty flat.
I also don’t think the opening scene did enough to build chemistry or rapport between the leads, so the emotional foundation never really landed for me.
The film is initially vague about what exactly happened, but the premise reveal itself was nice. The premise is actually pretty good but there’s not much beyond that. It ends up becoming a fairly predictable indie drama about grief and letting go, and once the central conflict is revealed, the rest of the story becomes easy to anticipate.
There were also moments that didn’t make sense; like someone grieving saying “I’ll just let Jesus take the wheel” and then actually being allowed to drive. Of course that’s gonna end well.
Even though the movie is shorter than the standard 90-minute runtime, it somehow still felt long because I was bored for most of it.
The Q&A afterward with Katie Aselton and Mark Duplass was honestly more entertaining than the movie itself. They talked about shooting the film in just 13 days and how the low budget limited what they could do creatively. The conversation was fun, which almost made me feel bad for disliking the movie as much as I did.
Feel kinda conflicted because it’s a really small movie and they said we were the advertisers through word of mouth but yeah, I didn’t like it.
