A slow boat to terror

MANILA, Philippines — The opening scene of Aurora is a portent of the pacing the moviegoer should come to expect: It starts off with a long shot of a remote island, then slowly — very slowly — tightens to reveal a forlorn hostel on the shore, with its pensive owner, Leana (Anne Curtis), staring at the distance. It appears that a large passenger ship, the Aurora of the title, has run aground in the rocky shoals offshore and has tilted onto its portside; some 1,000 lives were lost. In a voiceover, Leana tells the audience that she will help look for their bodies.

The ramshackle inn was made the temporary base of the coast guard and the victims’ relatives during the search for the dead and the survivors. But now, the search is over: The families of the unfound are leaving, and the Coast Guard has forbidden anyone from going near the wreck. In fact, the hotel itself is closing down; it is bankrupt and the windfall from the accident has come to an end. Some relatives, however, refuse to give up. They encourage Leana to remain open, even for only one more month. “Fifty thousand sa bawat katawan na matatagpuan mo” was the financial inducement.

So the catharsis was laid down for eerie things to happen while Leana, who had enlisted the aid of her fisherman friend Eddie (Allan Paule), stayed in the gloomy outpost. Eddie, a native of the island and who knows the seas around it like the back of his hand, is hoping the coming storm would create currents that will wash bodies ashore, resulting in more bounty for them after Leana agrees to share with him the reward monies. In the meantime, Eddie decides to become proactive by diving near the ship in hopes of finding bodies. Indeed, he finds one, the corpse of a circus giant whose remains were being transported home. His decomposing body is then hidden in a shed beside the hotel, away from the prying eyes of Rita, Leana’s much younger only sibling.

That is when things started going bump in the night, so to speak. Like that little boy in The Sixth Sense (1999), Rita begins to “see dead people,” the dead passengers of the ship. Pretty soon, Leana starts seeing them, too, restless souls clamoring for justice. The visions intensify, and then suddenly, by some occult occurrence, the sisters are transported into the day of the accident, looking at the horrific events from the victims’ point of view. Leana then realizes that the great number of victims was due to the vessel being loaded beyond capacity with passengers not appearing in the official manifest. Ultimately, the truth is revealed to all and sundry. Not only do the kin of the deceased find closure, but the souls of the dead also find peace.

True it is, what some critics say, that the movie is slow and plodding, but then it is how it should be; it cannot be otherwise. Set in a windswept, desolate location, the movie is about things that happen slowly: The tide coming in and out; dead bodies decaying and bloating in the water; morality waning; coming to terms with the loss of a loved one; the revelation of truth. Yam Laranas’ direction, with hues of dull blue and grey dominating each scene, is thus apropos. And his photography, showing the insignificance of man and his technology as against the strength of nature as manifested in the turbulent, churning waters of the seas, is stunning and profoundly introspective. It seems to say that the whole of mankind is but a tiny island in the midst of an infinite ocean of forces over which it has no control.

Aurora is, of course, a horror movie. But it is not the kind of horror movie that relies on shocks and visceral provocations. On the contrary, it instills in the viewer a sort of quiet terror over the consequences of deaths so senselessly caused by unadulterated greed and corruption.

Curtis, unmade up and deglamorized, is a gem, playing the part of the conflicted provincial lass with such depth of conviction that is easy to believe her character. The rest of the cast portrayed their roles so well that one can readily get immersed in the movie. But aside from the excellent camerawork (Laranas, after all, was first a cinematographer), the director’s greatest achievement here is making the decrepit hotel another character in the movie. Dilapidated and rickety, it provides the atmospheric milieu that makes the movie effective as a horror. It leaks, it creaks, it is dark and dusty, and it seems to interact with the live actors in every scene shot inside and outside it. Its only link to civilization being an old rotary-dial phone, the hotel exemplifies the corporeal and moral decay that suffuses every character and scene in the film.

The makers of Aurora should thus be congratulated for creating an evocative work of art without much eye for box-office potential, which is truly the spirit of a film festival. Would that every festival producer put first artistic merit so that, at least once a year, our movie-going public may be exposed to pictures that would — it is hoped — lead to more discernment and maturity in the Filipino audience. Only in that way may be Metro Manila Film Festival be true to its avowed purpose.