Magpie 2024

[Shazad Latif] chaperones his daughter Matilda to a movie set where she is co-starring in a period drama with a famous actress, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, who has recently been in the headlines for a leaked sex tape. The actress’s kind, maternal presence quickly draws Matilda and [Shazad Latif] into a warmer orbit, but this closeness comes at a cost at home: Anette, Daisy Ridley, has grown distant from her husband as their relationship has cooled over the years. She resents the pressures he placed on her to quit her job and move the family to the countryside, and she endured eight quiet months apart while he attended a writer’s retreat.

As the set friendship deepens, Alicia’s warmth and the way she treats Matilda begin to blur the lines between professional boundary and family feeling. Anette’s unease grows, and suspicion takes root when a tabloid photo surfaces showing the two women together. Unable to shake the doubt, Anette quietly starts to pry, ultimately stealing Ben’s phone while he sleeps and discovering that the two have been texting—flirtatious exchanges that hint at something more than a professional rapport.

The next day on set, Alicia offers a humble apology for the tabloid moment, and Ben answers with polite indifference, insisting the situation isn’t a big deal. Yet the texts continue, growing bolder in tone, and the pair slip into a secretive flirtation that neither Matilda nor Anette fully understands, straddling lines between friendship, temptation, and something more precarious.

On a day off, Ben remains home while Anette takes the children to the park. An acquaintance casually mentions Ben’s past history of infidelity, which reinforces Anette’s unease and pushes her to confront the fragility of her marriage. A text from Alicia suggesting a meet-up arrives, but Ben’s sense of control wavers; he agrees to meet but frantically calls it off when Anette returns home earlier than expected.

The following morning, Ben falls ill after a late dinner, and Anette takes Matilda to the film set in his place. Watching Matilda role-play a mother and daughter with Alicia, Anette experiences a jolt of fear—she wonders if she’s being emotionally replaced in her child’s life, a fear that gnaws at her while Ben recuperates.

When Ben is feeling better, he again takes Matilda to the set, only to receive a text directing him to a trailer. Through Matilda’s video camera, he catches a moment of Alicia performing a striptease for him, but the moment is interrupted when Matilda runs off, prompting Ben to scramble to find her. Anette arrives first at the scene, gently rebuking him for not watching their child closely enough and underscoring how the romance alleged in the tabloids has already started to fracture their family.

On the final day of filming, Anette quietly brings Matilda to the set early and keeps Ben from waking, leaving him to oversleep and stay home with Lucas. Alicia and Matilda shoot their last scenes together, and Anette invites Alicia to dinner at their house as a gesture of closure—though she’s actually testing Ben’s receptiveness to truth. Ben is startled by the unexpected dinner, and Anette repeatedly hints that she knows about the supposed affair and that he has lied to Alicia about his wife’s warmth and concern.

Alicia says goodbye to Matilda but refuses to continue the ruse, and Ben erupts, insisting he will divorce Anette. He drives away into the woods, reaching for a reconciliation that now seems doomed. The situation takes another shocking turn when he tries to contact Alicia, only to hear Anette’s voice on the other end—the result of Anette secretly swapping her number into Alicia’s contact. The revelation upends everything: Ben discovers he’s been texting his wife all along, and the supposed pursuit of an affair was a carefully staged deception. In a moment of fury and disbelief, Ben loses focus on the road and crashes, leaving his fate—and the truth of the supposed infidelity—unclear in the wake of a devastating twist.