Costa Rican documentary filmmaker Hilda Hidalgo makes her feature debut with this ambitious adaptation of celebrated Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s [Of Love and Other Demons]. Marquez’s prose is renowned for its magical realism, a literary motif often referred to as nearly un-filmable. This is the story of Sierva Maria, an adolescent girl born to a noble family and never afforded the chance to decide her own fate. When she is bitten a rabid dog and, as a result, believed to be possessed by a demon, her family officially abandons her, though her father succumbs to a bishop’s advice and takes her to be exorcised. With Cayetano Delaura, the young priest charged with the task, Sierva Maria allows her innate rebelliousness and burgeoning sexuality to blossom, and the two begin a relationship fraught with danger, secrets and passion. Carefully balancing on the fine line between the lyrical and the overwrought, and between elegance and turgidity, Hidalgo applies the same sensual, dreamlike qualities she brought to her short films and conceives a film as magical as its inspiration.