Harriet (Miriam Shor) was once a promising young film student, making one award-winning short film before dropping out of college. Flash forward a couple decades and she’s now a doormat of a housewife stranded in the exurbs of New Jersey with her philandering husband Bob (Josh Stamberg) and her moody teenage daughter Emma (Cameron Morton), who aspires to be an actress. Harriet deferred her dreams to be there for her family, but when her marriage finally implodes, she decides to throw caution to the wind, quit her job, and go back to film school, where she finds herself the only fortysomething among a classful of artsy young weirdos. When her feature script gets selected for a contest, she has an unexpected opportunity to make her dream come true by making an actual feature film based on her own script. Will she be able to realize her vision, or will she find out that dreams aren’t all they’re cracked up to be?
Writer/director Jacqueline Christy loosely based Magic Hour on her own experiences going back to film school in her mid-forties after establishing a career running at theater company. Though that background helps the filmmaking scenes ring true, Christy doesn’t really go for a documentary-like verisimilitude: this is a comedy, and everything that happens to Harriet is heightened for humorous effect from her cartoonish film school classmates to the ageism, misogyny, and jerk behavior that she encounters along the way.
What sells all of that is the central performances by Shor and Morton. Shor plays Harriet with big Kristen Wiig energy, a character that’s quick to smile even when she’s overwhelmed, who squirms when she doesn’t know what to say, who is hopeful for the future yet pessimistic in the moment, who uses kindness as her operating system despite how undeserving some that cross her path are. But her biggest blindspot is her daughter: Harriet doesn’t see how her pessimistic attitude that nothing will ever go right shapes what Emma thinks is possible in life, and she makes a fatal mistake in assuming that when her daughter asks for space that giving her that space is what she really needs. A big source of comedy in the film’s middle section is that Harriet is keeping her film school foray a secret, and Morton is hilarious as she misinterprets various things, just barely missing the secret that’s right under her nose. But Morton is even better toward the end of the movie, when all the cards are on the table and the mother-daughter relationship comes in for its landing.
Despite Harriet’s innate pessimism and the frustrating obstacles she finds herself facing, Magic Hour is a crowdpleasing comedy about mothers and daughters, about following your dreams, and about killin’ ‘em all with kindness while you do it. | Jason Green
Magic Hour will screen at the Arkadin Cinema & Bar (5228 Gravois Ave.) on Saturday, November 15 at 5:30 pm as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival 2025. Single film tickets are $15 for general admission, $12 for Cinema St. Louis members and students with valid current photo IDs. Multi-film and all-access passes are also available. Further information is available here, and more information about the film can be found on the official website.
