Any hint of country idyll is lost at the very opening of Borgy Torre’s Resureksyon. In its first ten or so minutes, the film introduces the monster born from within its rural milieu: an impoverished woman (Isabelle Daza), emboldened by the promise of a better life working abroad, decides to leave her sister and her son, only to return some months later in a casket. This premise isn’t new, not completely. Torre is taking points from Richard Somes’ modern classic Yanggaw (2008) in which a woman returns home from Manila with an affliction that turns her into an “aswang.”
Sure enough, Daza’s deceased OFW Mara rises from her casket during her wake, much to the townsfolk’s terror but curiously not even a hint to that of the only man of science in the room (Alex Castro’s Ramil, who attends to the resurged corpse like it’s common event), and here the film ostensibly builds upon the immeasurable fear of harboring a monster within the family.
What follows however is a Pompeii of unintentionally comic killings standard to Regal genre fare. The film’s obnoxious loanshark (Gee Canlas), who also happens to be the town’s first lady, is first on Mara’s kill list for obvious reasons. What isn’t clear is if it’s the film being contractually obligated to delivering a loud, admittedly technically sound kill sequence which sets the wick afire for the film. There’s a shirtless scene (if you’re that curious), this being a Regal horror film and all, of Paulo Avelino’s irascible detective cooking silver, paying due homage to the 1985 screen adaptation of a Stephen King novella Silver Bullet.
The film, deliberately paced, gets just in time into a climactic sequence set at the hospital—a blood-red standoff between Mara’s horde of vampires and the remainders of the town’s gun force—which makes for a few minutes that echoes the claustrophobic tension of dare I say Rio Bravo. Then again, if we’re being honest, Erik Matti (who also is also credited for the film’s story) sort of already did that in Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles.
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At the center is Ailah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), whose life, already at spur when her sister left her and her nephew Migs (Raikko Mateo), spirals into complete disarray when her sister returns home as a corpse and sits upright during the wake. For reasons undisclosed to the viewer, her sister appears eager to turn Migs into a vampire, making a trite cat-and-mouse game between the town’s authorities and Mara’s turned minions. Smith makes for a good canvas, surely a dear to work with for any director who make use of her childlike features and exteriors. Her exchanges between Castro and Avelino’s characters make for a promising dynamic, but as the film later proves, it’s all about promise, not so much on the follow-through.
The “technicians”—a term, mind you, that people still use as honorific for these people when they clearly do as much work in their craft; why is it hard for most to call them filmmakers too?—who tie the film together deserve equal credit. The music by Francis De Veyra, for instance, is not by any means overbearing unlike what litters the typical genre fare studios relentlessly spit out. There is something Carpenter-esque to it, making sort of a mesh between Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. The direction of photography (Neil Derrick Bion), while no doubt uneven, renders some very striking (and haunting) imagery. The editing, sound, and production design—by Sheryll Lopez, Allen Roy Santos, and Mikey Red and Veronica San Antonio, respectively—are all spot-on.
To say that Resureksyon is a lost cause barely sums it up. Torre’s previous work, the Joel Torre-starring Breaking Bad-like narcotics-thriller Kabisera, is one of the best Filipino films I’ve seen in 2013. Torre’s new film again bookends his film—one with the family being forged, another being destroyed. I can almost see at the periphery of my vision a film that isn’t bound by restrictions from the studio. Erik Matti, after all, is living the dream at this point. Making aswang films is the dream, is it not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WiTxJBWOU
