As first features go, Eduardo ‘Dodo‘ Dayao’s Violator (’14) is leaned more towards the introduction of a voice rather than the solidifying of a statement. I saw it the first time during its auspicious run at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival last November where it won, rightly, Best Picture; wrote a verbose, shit-faced reaction to it; and deemed it, in excitement, “virtuosic” an “aural assault.”
I still mean that almost half a year later. I stand by it.
The only difference now, after watching it again at this year’s CineSB, I am privileged of then-undiscovered treasures that Dayao cleverly (dis)places throughout his film.
Violator is a work of a cinephile, first and foremost—an intangible feat that perhaps draws me in to the film so much closer. Rare is the case of a filmmaker who almost maps his stylistic influences and have an expansive film journal document them: Dayao points you to David Lynch, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and quite possibly, Ingmar Bergman. Dayao has an apparent obsession with profiles, which paves the way for what in my book is one of the eeriest scenes of recent cinema. It is atmosphere to Dayao what is narrative function to Bong Joon-ho (Mother, ’09; Snowpiercer, ’14): it comes too early in the film, this ghost in profile, the scene that sets the film’s overall tone. It is straightforward and cuss. Incidentally, it is economical too: in that opening scene, Dayao exudes a ramming sense of dread for an eighth of the cost of what a filmmaker will normally spend on atmospherics.
This confluence of informed practice (of Dodo, the filmmaker) and sincere romancing with film (of Dodo, the cinephile) divulges into a most arresting experience. (Sidebar: why can’t it be the most special too? I’m almost certain every critic who has written a piece about Dayao’s film chortled at the realization that s/he is contributing to making the dreaded “critiquing the critic” happen literally.)
The end is nigh—three suicides, a creepy home video, and many ghostly apparitions signal it. The sky rips itself apart and begins work. Thunderstorm. Six males get stranded on a precinct, a setting whose convenience turns the odds to Dayao’s favor. The film is his ode to both Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, after all, and there is an unmistakable play at his characters’ machismo, similar to his forebears. Victor Neri, portraying the role of a dirty cop, perhaps exhibits this the clearest: his arrest of the night—the Enemy, as the sinister househelp (Andy Bais) would call him—is mere consolation to every inch of him lost to his superior (Cesar Montano) and by the gravity of their ghastly doings.
Outside, the typhoon breaks; the earth is soaked, overcast a rain of dying crows.
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The jail cell, damp and pitch-dark, is most appropriate a venue for both discussing and mediating death. Often, through Dayao’s informed use of the frame, his subjects emerge from a particular shadow where they come out of at the most precise moment. His subjects are not exclusive to people (and you already know that, his film being one about the Devil): in one particular scene, Dayao closes the camera tightly on Mang Vic (Bais) and Officer Manabat (Anthony Falcon) who speak about the forthcoming typhoon. Their conversation goes on, from life to death, then back to the beginning, and finally to the end. Dayao concludes this scene finally with a wide shot of the precinct, Mang Vic and Manabat sat on a long wooden stool, playing chess—a reference, I imagine, to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
There’s a shootout in the end, where the Enemy, named Nathan Winston Payumo (played by Timothy Mabalot, a young thespian channeling different degrees of devilries—from utterly terrifying to the creepish smiley-ness of The Clown from Spawn), crawls like a faceless reptile to wounded precinct chief Benito Alano. Joel Lamangan portrays his character with sheer brio, spewing mumbles only a dying widow can muster in a tone of grinning victory.
Earlier in the film, he speaks of a swindling syndicate that guises its members as a rapture cult. It’s a hoax that even the likes of Charito Solis get dragged into. “Ilang beses na ba dapat nagunaw ang mundo,” he asks. Unbeknownst to him, the Devil is already at work: on rooftops of corporations, on the four corners of promised nurture, on top of hills of asphalt—the Devil begins his work. A true cult already anticipates this and does something about it to grim, terrifying ends.
When asked about an alternate ending to his film, Dodo answers: “The floodwaters rise. The world ends. Everybody dies. Nobody grieves. In short, a happy ending.”
It is not Dodo’s heart of darkness (yet) Violator brings us to, and already it is a terrifying place.
This text originally appeared on the author’s blog (04/15/15).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pazg9rQItVw
