The audience doesn’t see Ferdinand Magellan for the first seven-and-a-half minutes of Magellan. Instead, the film begins on the wailing fear of the Indigenous people of Malacca at the sight of a white man, grounded in a ritual where they plead to their gods for protection. When the film finally comes upon Magellan (Gael García Bernal), he’s buried amongst a hundred slain men and women—in the aftermath of a Portuguese-incited coastal invasion that left Malay natives slaughtered and enslaved—barely breathing and eventually nursed back to health by his comrades-in-arms.
Magellan isn’t an average biopic, because Lav Diaz isn’t an average filmmaker. The experimental Filipino director is not the type to take on a biopic unless he has something unconventional to say and has the freedom to visualize it radically. That’s why he’s never worked within Hollywood and rarely within the comparatively financially humble and creatively free European system. Enter: European producing wundertroupe Marta Alves, Joaquim Sapinho, Montse Triola, and Albert Serra (who are also responsible for last year’s Misericordia and Serra’s Afternoons Of Solitude).
Opposed to the stereotypical biopic, which deigns to capture every part of a subject’s life through flashbacks, and to typical Diaz, whose last five features (over the past four years) have run from 187 minutes to 409 minutes, Magellan is a remarkably abbreviated and meditative take on the adventure epic, a 160-minute film covering the last 10 years (1511-1521) of the storied Portuguese explorer’s life, sailing from Malacca to Lisbon to Seville to the Filipino village of Cebu, where the film comes full circle: Magellan, buried on the coast amongst a slew of native bodies, finally having reaped the death earned by his conquests. In Diaz’s depiction, the ghosts of colonizers past swell up in one ferocious beast that is Magellan, hellbent on discovering a passage to the east by sailing west from Europe. On this journey, he becomes the first known to cross the Pacific Ocean, discovers the Strait of Magellan, and records Europeans’ first known contact with the Philippines.
After a vetted naval career under King Manuel I, Magellan hits a social, psychological, and financial wall upon his return to Portugal, unable to secure funding for his lofty dream voyage. He returns from the Portuguese Crown’s Asian expeditions in 1513, living a life in Lisbon that’s nothing short of shameful, as the women passing by on the street casually call out.
The deranged discoverer’s personal conviction in the roundness of the Earth and ability to circumnavigate the globe seems insane given his obstinate behavior (even knowing how things will turn out), coming off as no less than drunken hubris after being landlocked and insignificant for too long to be able to stand it (or up). He goes to Seville with Beatriz Barbosa (Ângela Azevedo), whom he marries, and convinces Spain’s King Charles I—and the powerful papal elite—to back his voyage across the world.
It’s hard to say exactly what Magellan wants: Christian conversions? Pure discovery? Wealth and power for the throne? Continued conquests to sate a colonizer’s bloodlust? A severing of Muslim trade? A life in charge? If it’s conversions he wants, the bevy of still, square frames staring upon murdered Indigenous bodies suggests otherwise. If it’s wealth and power for the throne, which one? If it’s to command control of trade to the Spice Islands, his approach is self-centered and irrational. Diaz never gives a straightforward answer; rather, he pitches a cocktail of carnal, ravenous, and avaricious incentives, many of which seem true but none of which come close to the personal lust for power that drives all of them.
Magellan is a hellish Catholic evangelical, both mid-voyage and in the newly discovered Philippines. A downright hilarious subplot—one minted for the likes of The Righteous Gemstones—reveals just how pious the Portuguese nobleman is, how much respect he has for clergy when he isn’t outnumbered by bishops or in desperate need of blood money funding for an expedition. He’s as cruel a ship captain as he is a territorial conqueror, everyone at the mercy of the madman’s dream. Diaz makes a mockery of Magellan in his depiction of the revered globetrotter, his take on the Age Of Discovery damning to say the least. In a stirring example, the filmmaker mirrors a shot of Portuguese colonizers lying blackout drunk across a recently conquered Malay village with a shot of the butchered Indigenous villagers in the nearby forest.
Much like in Zama or, in a more modern way, Pacifiction (also produced by the aforementioned four), the crazed colonizer decays before our eyes. From conqueror to street rat to charlatan and back again, Magellan bounces back and forth from redemption to public humiliation to shameless reinvention in vile (and sometimes uncharacteristically gentle) fashion. The quietly spiritual and abrasively political film should come as no surprise from the Filipino filmmaker, who descends from the same islanders Magellan unsuccessfully converts, consequentially brutalizes, and eventually succumbs to. Diaz wrote and directed Magellan—his first project strapped with an A-list actor in García Bernal, who gives the greatest performance of his career—did production design for the film, and is responsible, alongside Artur Tort, for shooting and editing it, too.
Tort’s steady, spellbinding, square-ratio camera is unmatched in its contemplative stillness, only ever moving if something (say, a voyaging ship) is rocking beneath it, causing it to sway with the rhythm of the ocean. Under the assured (and relatively concise) direction of Diaz, the style wields a static dynamism that explodes from frame to frame, with skin-shredding shrapnel that captures a colonial lust for power.
In an even greater twist on the biopic formula, Magellan ends up taking a backseat to Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), the enslaved Malay interpreter who, from his capture in 1511 to his final moments in the Philippines in 1521 cries out on behalf of the Indigenous people across Magellan’s final years of expeditions and concomitant massacres. It’s just another example of how Diaz’s Magellan is less about the explorer himself and more about what violent horror those who have been invaded must stoop to themselves—the very cost of freedom.
Director: Lav Diaz
Writer: Lav Diaz
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Ronnie Lazaro, Ângela Azevedo, Amado Arjay Babon, Bong Cabrera, Hazel Orencio
Release Date: January 9, 2026
