Violator

For an audience as discerning as the “Dodo” Dayao—his film writings, after all, are compiled in his expansive blog titled “Piling-Piling Pelikula“—the expectations for his film are naturally high. The man, known to a large sample of readers a prolific film critic* and ardent enthusiast, operates with a sense of cutting-edge precision, producing a work only conceivable by someone with many years of intimacy with the medium and knowledge of the language it uses. Violator is Dodo’s debut feature as filmmaker. And whether it enunciates a history of learning or his passion for the craft, Violator justifies Dodo’s transit between areas in the industry.

As promotion would call it, the film is a horror story. It is—technically. But there is more to it than that. There is an almost palpable sense of dread looming around his image and sound, an unseen phantom, if you will, creeping on stretched hallways, mossed terraces and lit hills of asphalt. This phantom is not captured in-frame, but its presence is unmistakable. It is unsettling.

For this, Dodo’s work of horror is effective. The first two thirds of Violator exist to serve simultaneously as mood pieces and intricate detailing of the new world the film envisions: hate crimes, suicides, rape, doomsday cults and other nightmares. The resonance to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo is easily recognizable, but where the 2001 chiller poses an apocalypse to end all disaffection and rifts in such an impersonal dystopia, Dodo’s film shuts in at present-day on a small precinct. The third act, set against the backdrop of a raging storm, finds the folk staffing the station faced literally with the Devil, echoing to them their demons, yanking out of their guts their darkest secrets. Like in Kairo, the characters in the film interact with each other but never truly connect. Except with the Devil.

I will break from here; to hint more of the plot is a disservice to Dodo’s great work. Allow me, instead, to expound on what makes the film work.

Hellish vignettes precede the horrific final act—an ‘intermission’ sequence, which depicts the ’98 Korean-apocalypse cult “Hyoo Go,” is particularly discomfiting, shot, seemingly, using epochal filming equipment, and aided with bursts of static sound. Arriving to this, nightmares have become a normality in the film that for a scrawny old help-staff to do such a disturbing thing that he did only seems ordinary. So. In the end, the question is posed whether the story still requires the bleakness of the End of Days?

No, no and no. Eduardo “Dodo” Dayao’s Violator is surrounded by a dreading sense of catastrophe; yet, it is not that this End compels the folk in Dodo’s new world to do most twisted things. It is not the End—not yet, not necessarily—but in the film’s reality it is the world that has become. No, it is no longer about human disconnect; Violator is past that, twenty minutes into the film. In times of unbearable distress, death and faith becomes an apt subject of discourse. And here Dodo inserts just an apt an homage, to Ingmar Bergman, with the latter act in which the Devil, behind bars, touches on the inevitability of death and inquires on the staffers’ faith. There is a chess scene that almost confirms that the whole of the arc is a reference to The Seventh Seal, but that is just me.
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Shredded of these numerous nods and homages, though—from Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth to Kanye West’s Yeezus—Dodo’s terrific debut can be received, finally, for the virtuosic, aural assault that it is.

*Dodo has frequently insisted that he is a ‘film blogger,’ than a ‘film critic.’

I smile at this knowledge. ‘Critic’ seconds to the word ‘epic’ when it comes to misused words.