Lav Diaz’s Magellan is an impossible fever dream across the seas, smuggled into the respectable body of a festival biopic. On paper, the 160-minute Cannes-premiering historical epic in colour, fronted by Gael García Bernal, is pitched around a name every schoolbook knows. But in practice, it works as a slow, methodical dismantling of the conquistador legend from a Filipino vantage point, hollowing out the great navigator in a tale about imperialism, complicity, and the people who were meant to stay on the margins.
The film opens in Malacca, 1500s, with an indigenous woman waist-deep in a river, checking stones, the forest around her thick with green and humidity. She spots a white figure and bolts; panic spreads through the settlement, and the “promise” of a foreign God is misread as blessing. Diaz then cuts to the aftermath with the earth churned, corpses strewn and the new arrivals moving through the carnage with insouciance. From there the film’s formal strategy is clear. Battle rarely appears in motion, but violence arrives as still life in its various manifestations. The square 4:3 frame and the Lumix cameras’ cool, painterly colours trap us inside these tableaux of conquest, as a series of colonial altarpieces where the saints are outnumbered by the dead.
Magellan (Portuguese, Cebuano, Tagalog)
Director: Lav Diaz
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Amado Arjay Babon, Angela Azevedo, Ronnie Lazaro, Hazel Orencio
Runtime: 160 minutes
Storyline: The story of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and his role in the Portuguese and Spanish colonial campaigns in Southeast Asia in the early 16th century
Magellan himself enters this landscape almost sideways. The ever-charming Bernal plays him as a man pulled forward by a combination of injury and entitlement: wounded in Malacca, restored in Lisbon by Beatriz, rejected by one crown and adopted by another, before finally sailing under Spanish colours toward an Eastern route that will make him indispensable. Diaz tracks him in fragments, through blessings and negotiations. The film’s emotional logic keeps cutting back to his betrothed Beatriz, left ashore with a child in her body and a husband in love with the sea. In dreams, she returns in soft focus, as a domestic ghost that belongs to a different film (the rumoured nine-hour Beatriz cut hovers like a phantom over everything we see).
If Magellan is the nominal subject, the film’s moral temperature sits closer to Enrique, the enslaved Cebuano man purchased in Malacca and brought along as translator, intermediary, and, eventual co-author of the narrative. Though his body carries the routes of empire, his language bridges the ship and the shore. When the expedition reaches Cebu and stumbles into Rajah Humabon’s world, Enrique’s fluency becomes a weapon that does not fully belong to either side. The late voiceover revelation that Lapulapu is a story invented by Humabon, that the massacre at Mactan is a calculated trap and that Enrique participates in the final slaughter to reclaim freedom, reframes the film as something sharper than a tragic portrait of hubris. It turns into a study in how colonised subjects manoeuvre inside the tightest cages.
A still from ‘Magellan’
| Photo Credit:
Rosa Filmes
Diaz’s thematic architecture is built around two entwined obsessions: religion as cover for resource extraction, and myth as a tool of state power. The Santo Niño statuette and the quince offering work as miracle and marketing. When a sick child recovers from the very same malady wrought by the invaders, the entire community is folded into the sanctuary of Christianity through a choreography of blood compact and bonfire. Later, when Magellan’s men burn the anitos, you feel the temperature of the frame shift from wary hospitality to looming payback. Humabon’s rumour-mongering about a vengeful Lapulapu feels farcical until you remember how many modern nation-states still rely on the convenience of ‘monsters’ to hold their narratives together.
Formally, Magellan features long, patient takes of forests and coastlines, but Diaz and co-cinematographer Arthur Tort move with more briskness than in his customary endurance-test work. The editing cycles through years with abrupt cuts that feel like missing pages in a chronicle. Battles are glimpsed through bodies already fallen. The replica of the Victoria sits in the water like a floating prison. Music is mostly replaced with weather, sea, rope, and the occasional sermon about suffocating the earth in the name of God.
Language is also another formal strategy at play. Portuguese, Cebuano and Tagalog co-exist, and from what I’ve heard, the Cebuano sometimes slips into contemporary cadences (imperceptible to non-Filipino’s) that Filipino audiences will clock immediately. The anachronism is a kind of Brechtian jolt that reminds you that this is a present-day argument about history, and not some uninspired museum diorama. It also dovetails with Diaz’s openly “revisionist” choice to turn Lapulapu into a myth manufactured by Humabon that has already annoyed historians invested in the hero’s official status, and delighted others like me who see value in shaking colonial history loose for the better.
A still from ‘Magellan’
| Photo Credit:
Rosa Filmes
Watching Magellan made me oscillate between boredom, dread, fascination, and a dry, bitter humour. Bernal spends huge stretches in wide shot, reduced to a figure skulking in fluffy explorer shirts, and the glamour drains out of him frame by frame. The execution of a crew member for homosexuality, the marooning of a mutinous priest and the endless Pacific drift where men rot in their bunks – Diaz shoots these with a flat, exhausted eye that makes the glorious “Age of Discovery” feel like workplace misery scaled up to planetary violence. If you walked in expecting a prestige adventure sold on the phrase “Gael Garcia Bernal as Magellan”, boy, is this the film for you (hehe).
By its close, as Enrique narrates the unmasking of Lapulapu and the trap that ends Magellan’s life, the film’s post-colonial posture fully reveals itself (if it hadn’t already). This wasn’t an attempt to “correct” the record as much as it was an insistence on foregrounding who gets to tell the story, in which language, and under whose flag. And the world Diaz sketches here feels unfinished by design, as if inviting us to walk back through the wreckage and keep arguing over what exactly happened on that beach.
Though, nothing quite matches the joy of watching the era’s most coddled colonial poster boy’s severed head turn into prime party merchandise.
Magellan was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa
Published – November 28, 2025 06:06 pm IST
