There are some people that don’t deserve redemption, their evil so pervasive and unchecked that the normal mechanisms of justice simply don’t work anymore. Dan Villegas’ Uninvited is one of the best of the year, a thrilling, engaging tale of taking matters into your own hands. More than any other horror film this year, it chilled me to the bone.
Lilia (Vilma Santos) comes to a lavish birthday party being held for Guilly Vega (Aga Muhlach). It’s quite clear from the onset that she’s there to take revenge. The film slowly reveals, over the next hour, why Lilia is taking revenge.
People born in the eighties or are familiar with goings-on in the nineties might recognize similarities with Guilly’s crimes and the crimes of another, well publicized case that took place during that time. A former fellow faculty member of mine was actually involved in that case, and the stories I heard from that time horrified even myself – and I work with gory stuff on a regular basis. That’s the scariest thing about Uninvited – no amount of ghosts or supernatural phenomena is scarier than the fact that the things that happen in this movie actually happened in real life.
Guilly himself is the epitome of unchecked, unlimited power, power that is condoned and tolerated. Aga Muhlach has played villains before – including serial killers – but he plays an unimaginably evil character here, perhaps the most evil. And this evil is not only seen in the way he acts around other people – his sliminess reminds me of a certain foreign politician – it’s also in the way the people around him react (or more accurately, the way they don’t react) to his actions, and in the way his henchmen help him commit that evil. His daughter Nicole (Nadine Lustre) puts it best when she tells Lilia why she condones a monster – it’s because she loves his money.
The ever-versatile Vilma Santos has had her share of dramatic roles in the past, but I haven’t seen her like this in a long time, if not ever. The way she looks down on the party crowd below exudes a tranquil fury that is ready to explode at any moment. This is a woman with nothing to lose. Uninvited at times segues into action, and Vilma is up to the challenge, but most of the film is about building tension and Villegas lets it build and build. I was glued to that screen for the entire time.
Uninvited tends to laser focus itself on Lilia’s revenge, leaving several plotlines by the wayside. But those plotlines are merely the effect of an excellent, well realized world. It’s still one of my favorite films of the year.
This review also appears on Present Confusion
