Magnus

Kadri Kõusaar wrote her own script for her feature debut about a sickly kid in a loveless and selfish family in Estonia. When Magnus fails to die as expected at an early age, a new challenge awaits him. While at first he filled his days completing tasks he put to himself in order to combat his illness in a magical way and extend his life, now he has to find something that makes life worth living. With a hysterical mother and a father who pays for his drug addiction by recruiting prostitutes to be shipped to Germany, he is left entirely to his own devices. Only his sister seems to have any sense of reality.
Kõusaar sketches very explicitly yet with a feeling for understatement a social drama in which it becomes clear that a lack of parental attention and responsibility can only yield depressed children. When Magnus comes to live with his father after attempting suicide, the father wants nothing more than to initiate his son into the pleasures with which he deals and snorts his way through the day. Magnus however knows what he wants and puts action in place of words. A striking documentary-like epilogue then puts the primarily atmospheric narration onto an almost journalistic level as the father looks back and admires his son because of the morbid dream that his pupil has fulfilled for him.

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