Erin and Charlie escape to the desert to navigate an unexpected and challenging new phase of their relationship.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Katie Aselton the writer, director, and star of the film?
Why does Charlie appear in the film if he is dead?
Is prior knowledge of grief or loss required to engage with the film?
When was it released?
Fun Facts
Katie Aselton directed and stars in the film, while her husband Mark Duplass co-wrote the screenplay. Aselton has stated the film isn't explicitly about their actual marriage, but has also admitted it's "not not" about their long-running relationship, making the boundary between fiction and autobiography deliberately ambiguous.
When Deadline broke the news in April 2024, they reported that Aselton and Daveed Diggs had already wrapped filming on what was described as a "secret Duplass Brothers Production." The movie was essentially in the can before it was ever publicly announced.
Rather than holding its central revelation for the finale, the screenplay drops its major narrative twist roughly one-fifth of the way through — a structural gamble critics called an "ambitious swing" that recontextualizes everything that follows.
After the studio-scale Mack & Rita (2022), Magic Hour was shot largely in one house in Joshua Tree, California with a tiny principal cast — a deliberate return to the intimate, low-budget "Duplass production mode" that defined her 2010 debut The Freebie.