REVIEW: ‘Magellan’ fails to sail beyond stagey ‘art-house’

I’m not sure if there was a projection issue at the cinema where I watched Lav Diaz’ Magellan, but it looked like it had not been color corrected. It almost felt like a deliberate low-budget aesthetic — footage left ungraded to convey a documentary feel. It is confusing, especially compared with the gorgeous visuals in the trailer.

That, however, is not my main complaint. Diaz’s 2025 Cannes film, which the Philippines has submitted for the 2026 Best International Feature Oscar, reflects his signature style as a slow cinema auteur. His films are long, self-indulgent works, designed less for entertainment than for reflection and contemplation.

The problem with Magellan is not its length or contemplative pace. It is that it often feels staged, losing the hyperrealism it seems to aim for.

Shot in a nearly square 4:3 aspect ratio, the compositions are consistently layered. Landscapes, jungles and beaches are framed with foreground, midground and background, giving the 16th-century world visual depth that almost feels three-dimensional.

Yet, as in previous Diaz films, there is a telenovela quality that keeps pulling you out of the film, with some performances carrying a melodramatic tone. It creates a disturbing dissonance, placing theatrical acting in what is supposed to be ruminative, art-house cinema.

The film opens with a female native in Malacca, genitals exposed, scooping water from a knee-deep river. She performs a scripted, screaming action and runs away. This stagey feel continues, especially in the jungles of the East Indies and later in the Philippines. Sparse dialogue is often interrupted by over-the-top wailing, mostly during invocations to pagan deities.

There was one ritualistic scene where I swear one of the extras in the far left corner was trying not to laugh. Her shoulders were shaking uncontrollably. It could not have been part of the wailing; the rest of her companions were frozen like photographs, serious and staged.

Unlike last year’s Phantosmia, superbly acted by both the principal cast and extras, Magellan feels contrived. You can almost anticipate the script: where actors will lie down, how a slave might toss pebbles deliberately near the camera. The lack of authenticity makes the stretched runtime laborious to watch.

A breath of fresh air comes in the Portugal scenes. Here, the staged compositions feel more appropriate, with a painterly quality: warm yellows, creams, ochres, muted greens and terracotta tones. Golden beaches with women in black, ochre cliffs, deep blue seas and majestic sailing ships — the carracks — are visually striking.

Gael Garcia Bernal as Magellan is, as always, reliable. He is the only natural, believable character here, from his conversational tone to his gait, even when lying in bed with gangrene. But he is mostly alone in this; other characters, including Enrique, the slave-interpreter, feel like they are merely acting.

Diaz’s style — parking a single camera in a staged composition and letting movement enter the frame — prevents audience engagement with tension or dialogue. Wide shots feel like peeking through a window at a neighbor’s conversation. Subtitles exist, but the distance created by full-frame compositions denies an intimate connection with characters’ inner lives. Method acting is irrelevant here; performers merely inhabit costumes.

Violence is almost entirely off-screen, reminiscent of Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay. While this could be a stylistic choice consistent with Diaz’s inertia-driven cinema, it feels inconsistent when the film depicts one extended act of sodomy.

There is no singular point of view. The perspective jumps from Magellan to the slave, to natives, the page boy, a priest and Beatriz. The result is a fragmented narrative, like flipping through a coffee-table book of photos — not of 16th-century people, but actors dressed to resemble them. Everything feels costume-driven and staged, making the two-hour, 40-minute runtime feel like a two-year expedition inside the cinema.

I am no historian, but from what I remember of textbooks and Pigafetta accounts, the natives would have been modestly dressed. In Magellan, not only is Lapu-Lapu treated as a myth (an admittedly intriguing theory), but the exposure of native genitalia seems inaccurate, included for shock value rather than historical or cinematic authenticity. This is not slow-burn cinema; it is gimmicky art-house fare.

1.5 out of 5 stars

Now showing in Philippine cinemas