Jolts, chills and screams

The Sukob challenge is dead simple. If you watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water last week, or are just a fan of horror/suspense films, I enjoin you to catch this latest offering of director Chito Roño, Star Cinema’s Sukob – and tell me which film actually works better!

For this writer, M. Night hit our movie consciousness with a deserved Big Bang with his The Sixth Sense, but nothing he has done since then (Signs, The Village and now, his waterlogged Lady) comes close to that debut film. Direk Chito, on the other hand, began his "long in the tooth" career with such landmark films as Private Show and Kailan Ka Maging Akin, and, in recent years, has re-invented himself as a master of the horror/fantasy/suspense genre, thanks to Feng Shui, the Spirit Warriors films and his TV series Spirits.

A successful horror film is like a great amusement park ride – it’s suspension of disbelief, the number of jolts, chills and screams one can muster from the experience, and the leaving of the theater or park without feeling short-changed, cheated or deliberately hoaxed. To an extent, one enters wanting to be "duped" and brought to that state of giddy exhaustion from having been terrorized within the safety of the cinema seat or having been strapped for the ride. On these counts, Sukob delivers in spades.

The film is a double helix narrative, and it’s a tool Roño effectively utilizes to heighten suspense and the audience’s awareness of the eerie coincidences at play. The first strand has to do with about-to-be wed Sandy (Kris Aquino) and Dale (Wendell Ramos). Foreboding is created by the discovery of Sandy that her childhood friend and neighbor Helen, and Helen’s whole family, have suffered a procession of fatal misfortunes, and these are ascribed to Helen’s not having heeded the superstition (the first kind of sukob) that one should not marry so soon after a death in the family (in this case, Helen’s father).

That something ominous and supernatural is at work is re-enforced when Dale’s niece, Joya (Maja Salvador) shows up, possessing psychic powers. The other seemingly unconnected narrative has to do with the series of unfortunate events that befalls newly-married couple provincial lass Diana (Claudine Barretto) and Brian (Bernard Palanca). In the course of the film’s development, mention is made of the second type of sukob – that siblings should not have their respective marriages also within the same year. And while obviously this is the "set-up" for how the seemingly disparate two narratives will somehow intersect, we readily allow Roño to take us on his rollercoaster of a film-ride.

Claudine has always been a luminous presence, and this film is no different. As with Feng Shui, direk Chito takes Kris to new heights of acting. That her role is the more practical, urbanized personality suits Kris well, providing sharp contrast to the more beguiling, submissive innocence of Claudine’s probinsiyana character.

The revelation in this film is Maja Salvador. It would be too easy to ascribe it to her genetic material, but the Salvador clan has a true winner in this young actress. The standouts in the supporting cast are too numerous to mention, but Ronaldo Valdez as the father of Kris’ character has to be mentioned.

Direk Chito’s story was turned into a screenplay with the collaboration of Cris Martinez, and kudos to them for turning love, family and marriage into a horrifying tale of tempting fate and retribution. The use of music, creative editing, the use of foreshadowing (the nosebleed during the wedding of Sandy and Dale), the visual counterpoints (the blessing of matrimony in one narrative segues to the blessing of extreme unction in the other) – these are all pitch perfect and show how much thought has been put into the film. This may have been a film-in-the-making for close to a year (thanks to the busy schedules and story revisions), but the wait was well worth it.

There are elements in the film when a homage of sorts is being made to the recent spate of Asian horror films like The Ring and The Grudge, but one has to hand it to direk Chito. He constantly "ups the ante," providing fresh horror after horror, heightening the tension from early on, and never flagging. We may have been manipulated, there may have been "red herrings" in the story, but by and large, at a time when one can feel jaded about horror films, this is one successful cinematic journey.

Hearing of the premieres set in the US and Australia, one can only hope a good dubbed version could also be assembled to see how the film fares beyond overseas Filipino communities and those in art film circles who flock to sub-titled to English films. Of course, it would be difficult to still call the film Sukob, or explain via the title our superstitions about marriage, and perhaps we will have to call it something simpler, like retribution.

Good night, M. Night! I will stick to Chito Roño for my diet of horror films.