Suspension of disbelief seems to be the glaring demand of most movies at the 50th Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). Uninvited, Dan Villegas’ revenge thriller comeback six years after his last full-length feature, is no exception. The story is the stuff of teleseryes: Lilia Capistrano (Vilma Santos) goes by the alias Eva Candelaria, pretends a life she has not lived, and gatecrashes a party by and for billionaire crime lord Guilly Vega (Aga Muhlach) to dole out justice for the murder of her daughter Lily (Gabby Padilla), whose lover Tofy (Elijah Canlas) also suffers a fatal end.
Propelled by the real-life story of Mexican activist Miriam Rodríguez Martínez, who hunted down the drug cartel people responsible for her daughter’s abduction and murder, Villegas, alongside writer and Violator director Dodo Dayao, presents a story that is set within a night fueled by flashbacks with an expediency that might sweep the viewer. And without the lexicon to properly describe what makes a viewing encounter so sweeping, it becomes so easy to default to superlatives and near absolutes, glossing over painful lapses — whether wittingly or unwittingly.
Uninvited reaps highlights from Dayao’s dialogue and cinematographer Pao Orendain’s sleek, stylish lensing — which also conceals its rickety elements — laden with Len Calvo’s score that simply won’t buckle. In so doing, the movie is afforded a leeway to compel the audience to simply move along; to arrive at the final slashing act with myopic regard for complexity. For instance, it tells us that its protagonist has long been preparing for this pursuit of justice. But as soon as she enters the mansion where the party is held, she declares she’ll just wing the whole thing because of the stringent security that is somehow nowhere to be found when bodies begin to drop.
Past this, Muhlach’s character exists as a one-size-fits-all villain — a raping, murdering, drug-dealing evil that ought to be defeated, full stop. It is totally fine if the story functions as an actual, devil-may-care square-off between Guilly and Lilia. Instead, the text spikes Lilia’s plotline with numerous motivations, inciting incidents, and gray areas (though it rarely counts as depth) which Guilly is deprived of, alongside the rest of the characters, who all feel like mere projections of the movie’s many ideas rather than lived-in beings.
Even Nadine Lustre’s glowing take on Guilly’s daughter — the spiteful and infinitely cursing Nicole — cannot make up for a character who has no active part to play. Mylene Dizon’s Katrina, Guilly’s wife who no longer harbors any affection for him and is secretly having an affair with his right-hand man Jigger (RK Bagatsing) — as well as Tirso Cruz III’s Red, both friend and foe to Guilly — also play perfunctory characters, operating like cogs in a machine. It’s hard to find substance in the lives of these characters, let alone in the movie itself because they are afforded nothing but archetypal details. It’s plausible that commercial and genre movies tend to favor familiarity, but the formula must also cohere into something more potent, past an affirmation of what we already know.
Most frustrating of all is how the picture fridges Padilla’s character solely to service Santos’ revenge plot; it defiles and kills her to warrant its eat-the-rich navel-gazing and narrow notion of female solidarity in the end. There’s an unsettling juncture where the narrative zips back and forth between Guilly’s monologue about defying his destiny and flashbacks of Lily’s rape. Misguided viewers might tout this as a powerful narrative device, but it’s really far from the statement the movie thinks it parades. If anything, it’s a classic case of reveling in a character’s misfortunes. It is one thing to represent rape onscreen, but it’s another thing to frame it with acuity and care. Then again, it no longer strikes particularly surprising, given that this is Dayao’s foray into the American indie exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 1980s (think Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 or Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left), which is to say that genre tradition still kneecaps the movie. Thankfully, Padilla gives Lily — another role migrating between languages — a palpable tenderness. She extends the character with acting touches that generate some sort of interior life, however short-lived, and refuses to cave into how the text easily rationalizes her presence.
Meanwhile, female rage roles are nothing new to Santos’ catalog. She has helmed similar parts like in Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Tagos ng Dugo and Chito Roño’s Ikaw Lang. In Uninvited, she’s a dynamite, summoning the endurance of those past lives to make way for a maternal figure who’s committed to see her mission through to the bitter end, but remains fundamentally human.
But much like its premise and protagonist, Uninvited gatecrashes its way into meaningful insights. It is too contained in its own scheming, in its impressive array of stars, to come up with a story that doesn’t belie a profound critique, or feel like a bloated climax. Simply synthetic.
Uninvited runs at the 50th Metro Manila Film Festival until January 14.
