manzanojam

This movie is M.Night Shyamalan's way of telling and getting back at his critics..."OK, you want a good horror movie, Let me give you a medley of the best horror stories and films ever created and I am gonna put this adult diaper full of s**t on your face!" And how he did so with the virtuosity of a master. With subtlety and subliminal images of the best horror films ever created like The Shining and Suspiria. He even paid homage to Asian horror flicks with the claustrophobic hide and seek scene and the surprisingly predictable but necessary twist revealed at the last 15 minutes of the film. Even the most recent movies such as The Taking of Deborah Logan and Oculus are not spared. The only things that are not so subtle here are the "found footage" premise, the Hansel and Gretel/Little Red Riding Hood references and his parody of James Wan's horror hits.

What made this movie a success is how it was treated. How he managed to build and layer the story with humor and dread is a testament of how great a story-teller the director is. It is a lesson for every aspiring horror directors on how to do a very scary film without the usual in your face scare and gore tactics. After all, our imagination is so much scarier.

This haunting tale about two "sisters" may seem like a cliché and somewhat inferior to its Asian predecessors in terms of scare factor and twisted storytelling. The script has its loopholes(to cite a few inconsistencies: no one,aside from the four characters in the movie,has ever seen Olivia when she was alive, I mean, really? And how did Mara get her degree in Education, even snag a guy in the process, when it was not shown that she even left Olivia's side as the "guardian"? And this one baffled me the most: What on earth was Olivia's parents thinking when they adopted a very young Mara to be the caregiver of their very wild, deranged child? Actually, I seriously thought that they are the crazy ones).

But there are also several redeeming factors in this film. The slow burn approach that heightened the mysterious and creepy quality of the film. The cinematography that is both beautiful and eerie at the same time. And best of all, the casting ensemble led by Ms Nora Aunor. I was so entranced by her performance that I could not take my eyes away from her.I was literally, blown away by her. No histrionics, and very few speaking lines and yet, she was able to tell the story with masterful subtlety and control, of a woman who is on the brink of madness and guilt-ridden woes, who decided her fate with an ultimate question. Did she do it as a sacrifice for love as an atonement for her "broken" promise or did she do it to escape the inner demons she has been battling all these years?