Bor Ocampo’s Moneyslapper — the new John Lloyd Cruz-starring satirical thriller that premiered at the 2024 QCinema International Film Festival — is both defined and held back by a contradiction that lies at its murky core. This groggy, absurdist tale of a poor man becoming obscenely rich, then returning to his Pampanga hometown years later to seek revenge, confidently sprays a volley of criticism at every target it comes across. And in the same breath, it also remains oddly defeatist about all the exploitation, hypocrisy, and deep historical scars that it exposes.
But while Ocampo finds ways to spin all this into an engaging, challenging experience, even Cruz and Jasmine Curtis-Smith, whose performances internalize these themes with clear, painstaking effort, don’t entirely succeed in getting the film’s hopelessness to mean something more.
There is a case to be made that the sheer discomfort that Moneyslapper creates is exactly the point. Armed with nothing but bags of his lottery winnings, Cruz’s character Daniel travels across Porac to either help, hurt, or humiliate figures from his past. But after every stop, there is still little to no catharsis to be found in Daniel’s blank, unsettling stares. Cinematographer Larry Manda occasionally taps into more heightened emotion through tight close-ups (usually of characters’ mouths) that overwhelm the screen. But for the most part, Manda sticks to the uneasy objectivity of the medium shot, presenting these people as essentially the same in relation to one another.
Similarly, at times it seems like Ocampo and editor Noah Loyola are going to tell this story as a sprawling epic fit for a hero, as its first act skips forward in time with a punk swagger. But as soon as we cut to the new Daniel, clean-shaven, enjoying alcohol and the company of women on a yacht, the film slows to a languid pace that renders his personal crusade plain and futile. And yet it’s hard to say that Ocampo ultimately thinks of Daniel as pathetic when he still approaches sex and violence (Daniel’s only real outlets) in a pulpy, visceral way that aestheticizes the explicit into the fantasies of being a powerful man.
But even if Daniel’s characterization doesn’t read as perfectly coherent in the script (penned by Jason Paul Laxamana and Norman Wilwayco), Cruz definitely seems to have a firm grasp of the character’s psychology, inflating the silences with unbearable tension just from the way he stares off into space. A scene in which Daniel and Curtis-Smith’s Jessa sit at a restaurant table becomes genuinely suffocating; Daniel is all tensed up, eyes unblinking, his body angled as if ready to send all the dishes scattering. And when Jessa suggests her own plan for vengeance, Cruz suddenly lets out a teenager’s yelp of “Hayop!” (Animal!) He’s all aggressive masculinity with nowhere to go.
Curtis-Smith, her hair chopped all the way down to a boyish cut, is just as considered with her actions. As her Jessa impulsively lets herself be dragged along in Daniel’s schemes, she regards him with a mix of admiration and concern, and still putting up niceties for the people he’s obnoxiously rude towards. Both the character and the actress’ work would’ve been more interesting, however, if Jessa actually had an active role to play. Without her own arc playing parallel to Daniel’s, she comes off more like a disclaimer — a disapproving face that we regularly cut back to as the film’s way of telling us it doesn’t fully condone Daniel’s actions.
Much like how everyone in the film is eventually dragged into Daniel’s mess, the rest of the film can’t help but keep getting tangled up in the script’s own vague ethics. It’s not even that Moneyslapper is “too dark”; it is that it can’t decide why it’s trying to be so dark in the first place. The corruption of Daniel’s soul is difficult to trace when he’s playing Robin Hood in one scene, then murdering another disenfranchised person the next. While it would be tempting to simply label him an agent of chaos or some sort of nihilist, a climactic interaction he has with characters played by Charlie Dizon and Timothy Castillo suddenly gives him a banal humanity, the film refusing to let this moment lead him anywhere more interesting.
The film definitely hints at promising ideas — namely Daniel’s inability to imagine a better future for himself, instead leading him back to past grudges. The film’s heavy-handed statements on the Philippines’ continuing cycle of being oppressed by new colonizers make for unexpected bookends to a story that seems much angrier towards religion, abusive parents, and other Filipinos. With all its anger, Moneyslapper only ever seems to throw up its hands, shrug its shoulders, and do nothing but stew in its own bitter feelings.
