Magazine Dreams (2023)

Heavy on the soul, yet absolutely a must-watch.

Unapologetic rant incoming…

Magazine Dreams is about the terrifying cost of dreaming. Magazine dreams, sports dreams, business dreams, film dreams – everyone has the right to dream. More importantly, everyone has the right to chase those dreams with everything they have. Success, fulfilment, happiness: these are not luxuries but deeply human aspirations. Yet what writer/director Elijah Bynum understands is that every dream comes with visible and invisible costs. Some are physical. Some are mental. Some slowly erode the soul.

There is a saying: “Be careful what you wish for; it might cost you who you are.” (If you are into Aesop’s Fables). Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) is a man who wants nothing more than to become the best. Majors inhabits him with such frightening dedication that the performance transcends acting, becoming a form of emotional exposure. What he achieved with his body is just amazing, but his facial expressions purely complement his titanic effort. What needs to be understood is that as Killian’s body grows stronger, his mind fractures under the weight of obsession, trauma, loneliness, and relentless social cruelty. The film takes for granted that he is mentally unwell, but what it is asking you to think is whether the pursuit itself amplifies the illness, or whether the illness is what fuels the pursuit in the first place. That ambiguity, while not in focus, provides plenty to think about.

Bynum crafts a devastating psychological portrait of a man trying to sculpt perfection out of pain. The balance between drama and thriller is, to my mind, immaculate. The film pulses with dread, yet never loses sight of the human tragedy at its centre. Killian, as I’ve said more times than I count, is a mirror held up to a paradoxical society that celebrates ambition while ridiculing those who dare to pursue it openly. And here lies the more personal sting.

We live in a world where those who never dared often mock those who do. The spectators of comfortable couches, hidden behind screens and keyboards, humiliate the dreamers, the strivers, the people willing to risk failure in public. And for what? To get a “like.” It is easier to laugh from a chair than to stand up and try.

Unfortunately for Killian – and for many real-life Killians – the harder he tries to become stronger, the more he breaks. Majors’ performance was widely singled out as award-worthy, even as the film’s release was severely delayed after his 2023 conviction on misdemeanour assault and harassment charges, which led major studios to distance themselves from both him and the project. Whatever one’s view of the actor, the film itself deserved to be seen, and Bynum and his work perhaps paid the highest price in that fallout.

Everyone deserves a chance, not only to dream, but to be understood. To be accepted for who they are. And before you rush to cast any stones, just pause for a second and ask yourselves what you would do for a chance or even a second chance in life?

One last note, name one thing that is free in this world. I’ll start… kindness!