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Beautiful Creatures
Year - 2013
Studio - Warner Bros.
Stars - Alice Englert, Alden Ehrenreich, Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons, Emmy Rossum, Emma Thompson
Director - Richard LaGravenese
Writing Credits - Richard LaGravenese, Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl
Music - Thenewno2
Synopsis (AI Generated)
In the small, sleepy town of Gatlin, South Carolina, high schooler Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) has been having recurring dreams about a girl he's never met. That girl turns out to be Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), the mysterious niece of the town's reclusive "town devil," Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons), who has just enrolled at the local high school. Ethan is drawn to Lena immediately, despite the town's superstitious hostility toward her family, stoked by mean-girl Emily Asher (Zoey Deutch) and the fire-and-brimstone town matriarch Mrs. Lincoln (Emma Thompson). As Ethan and Lena grow closer, he learns her family's secret: they are "Casters," a hidden race of magical beings. Lena is approaching her sixteenth birthday, at which point she will be "Claimed" for either the Light or the Dark — but unlike other Casters, who choose their path, Lena has no say in the matter because of a curse laid generations earlier by her ancestor, Genevieve Duchannes, during the Civil War, after a spell to save her dying lover went wrong and doomed the women of the family to be claimed against their will. Macon, Lena's uncle and guardian, is himself a Dark Caster (an "Incubus") who has chosen to feed only on dreams rather than souls in order to protect his niece. Ethan's housekeeper and de facto guardian, Amma (Viola Davis), is revealed to be a practitioner of old hoodoo/rootwork traditions and has her own history tangled up with the Ravenwoods and with Ethan's late mother, who left behind research connecting Ethan's family to the Duchannes curse.
Complications escalate when Ridley Duchannes (Emmy Rossum), Lena's cousin — already Claimed Dark as a Siren who can control minds with her voice — returns to town with Ethan's best friend Link (Thomas Mann), whom she's manipulating for her own amusement. Ridley works to push Lena toward the Dark, seemingly at the behest of Lena's true mother, Sarafine, an immensely powerful and dangerous Dark Caster believed dead. It's revealed that Sarafine has been secretly possessing Mrs. Lincoln's body throughout the film, using her to torment Lena and manipulate the town from within. Ethan and Lena, aided by Macon and Lena's other aunt, Del (Eileen Atkins), race to uncover the truth about Genevieve's curse in hopes of breaking it before Lena's birthday. Ethan discovers he's a descendant of Ethan Carter Wate, Genevieve's Civil War-era love, whose death set the curse in motion — meaning Ethan and Lena's romance is, in a sense, a continuation of that doomed history.
In the climactic confrontation, Sarafine (in Mrs. Lincoln's body) and Ridley move to force Lena's hand toward the Dark. Macon sacrifices himself, using his own death as a loophole to save Lena from Sarafine's influence, and Lena's cousin Larkin (Kyle Gallner) is exposed as a shapeshifter working with Sarafine. On her sixteenth birthday, at the moment of Claiming, Lena defies the entire premise of the curse: rather than being claimed for Light or Dark, she chooses to embrace both parts of herself, breaking the curse that had bound the Duchannes women for generations. This act neutralizes Sarafine's power and saves Ethan's life in the process.
The film ends with the immediate crisis resolved — the curse broken, Sarafine defeated, and Macon dead — but with Ethan and Lena's relationship, and the wider mysteries of the Caster world, left open for a sequel that was never made, since the film underperformed at the box office.