MAGAZINE DREAMS - Mark Reviews Movies

Magazine Dreams, Briarcliff Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 20, 2025

There's a compelling and unsettling character study at the core of Magazine Dreams. Writer/director Elijah Bynum's movie follows a bodybuilder with ambitions to become as famous as such a figure can, but like the competitions he attends and doesn't win, this man's dreams and body essentially amount to a kind of a show. It's all meant to hide the kind of man he is.

The issue with Bynum's story, perhaps, is that it doesn't quite know how far to take this character. The big question surrounding the character is whether he's simply a deeply insecure man, devastated by a tragic past filled with uncertainty and abuse, or a narcissist, who is only certain that he deserves everything he doesn't have and his failure is everyone else's fault. It's often difficult to tell those two kinds of personality apart, and considering how much sympathy Bynum attempts to imbue within his protagonist, one wonders if the filmmaker is entirely sure of who this man is supposed to be.

Most of the confusion arrives very late in the story, which obviously means it's difficult to address directly in a review. What can be said of the finale, however, is that it seems to be leading the character toward an inevitable end, based on the notion that he does show an inflated sense of entitlement, a lot of pent-up resentment, and a propensity toward anger and even violence when anything about him or his sense of self-worth is challenged. Based on everything we see about the guy and the course of this tale, only one ending seems likely, and while Bynum's screenplay takes it there, the movie ultimately can't follow through on it in a satisfying or even consistent way.

Until that point, though, the story is fairly comprehensive about Killian Maddox, played by a wholly dedicated Jonathan Majors (in a role that might touch a little too close to the actor's very public legal issues). Killian is devoted to trying to reach the pinnacle of muscle size and definition, but after years of lifting weights and eating several thousand calories a day, he continues to come up short whenever he participates in a bodybuilding competition.

Outside of that, Killian has a seemingly ordinary and even mundane life. He lives with his grandfather William (Harrison Page), a Vietnam War veteran who raised his grandson with the philosophy that life isn't fair and no one should expect it to be. Killian also works at a local grocery store, where he has a crush on fellow employee Jessie (Haley Bennett), who is kind, sweet, pretty, and flattered when the nervous Killian asks her out to dinner.

Otherwise, his life revolves around bodybuilding. He exercises, ingests those calories, makes awkward videos about the sport for a small but harshly critical group of online viewers, and constantly writes to his hero Brad Vanderhorn (Michael O'Hearn), who sits at the top of the bodybuilding world. Brad hasn't responded to any of Killian's letters, either by mail or by taking up his fan's offer to call him, but Killian keeps writing that he understands the pro must be very busy.

There's another side to Killian, though—one that isn't immediately apparent to those who know him, see him in competition, or us. Despite his hulking physique, the man comes across as meek and timid, but a scene with his counselor (played by Harriet Sansom Harris) gives us the initial hint. Killian has been violent in the past, leading him to require counseling in the first place, and during a recent hospital stay, a nurse alleged that he threatened to kill her in a specifically gruesome way. Killian denies it, of course, but when he calls some painters whose work he isn't happy with, that exact threat comes out of his mouth.

Watching this attitude and this behavior escalate during Killian's almost single-minded quest for fame is notably but necessarily disturbing. The man begins to take out his frustrations on others (such as how he responds to those painters hanging up on him by "visiting" their store), himself (using steroids, ignoring a doctor's dire warning about the state of his liver, and attending a competition after the painters retaliate against his outburst), and even his hero, whose unresponsiveness Killian begins to take as a personal insult. There are few hopeful glimpses, and even those are sabotaged, such as when he and Jessie do go out on a date. It becomes an increasingly uncomfortable monologue of sharing far too much about his past and all of the things the world owes him.

Majors' performance grounds this material with the troubling way he makes Killian completely comprehensible—almost sympathetically so at times, given just how much we know or can infer that the character has endured since childhood—and, hence, genuinely frightening. The story becomes about pushing this man, as well as this man pushing himself, toward some edge from which he might never return (The script might push too hard too early, since a legal problem arises before the most significant shift and is summarily dropped).

We don't necessarily want Magazine Dreams to head down what seems a preordained path, if only because of the likely horror of it, but even so, the movie's dubious, wishy-washy conclusion doesn't feel honest following everything before it. Indeed, it makes us question how authentic the whole of this character study has been.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products