Rating: C-
Dir: Lawrence Fajardo, John Philip Koch
Star: Christine Bermas, Mark Anthony Fernandez, Sid Lucero, Alexa Ocampo
It feels as if this deliberately ignored or subverted the typical conventions of the rape-revenge movie. While a brave decision, the makers forget these conventions exist, largely because they work. If you are going to flout them, you need to deliver an alternative of equal or greater value. This doesn’t do so, and will probably leave most viewers annoyed and/or dissatisfied. The problem is the revenge part of the equation, which gets so little time devoted to it, there’s no alternative except for things to feel rushed and perfunctory. The movie feels it’s just getting going when the end credits roll, and even an extended mid-credit sequence is a case of too little, too late.
The heroine is Rachel (Bermas), an anthropologist from Baguio, in the north of the Philippines. She’s getting ready to move to Melbourne for two years, both to complete her masters and be with her emigrant mother. Before departing, her friends Hannah (Ocampo) and Sydney arrange a triple date with three guys, up from the capital of Manila. Initially, they seem very nice, but things take a turn for the far worse after the trio accept an invite back to the house of the men’s friend, Elijah (Fernandez). There, the women are drugged and raped. Two of them die, for various unintended reasons, with Rachel the only survivor. She poses a thorny problem, and ends up left for dead in the same shallow grave as her friends (top).
Where this differs, is simply in not reaching that point until eighty minutes into the 97-minute running time. We get a lot of time on set-up, establishing the characters on both sides. These are your archetypal “nice guy” rapists, to the extent that you wonder why they bother with all the troublesome drugging. Indeed, there is some perfectly consensual sex going on, after the party arrives at the house. I think simply some sweet talk, and perhaps a wine cooler or two, could well have led to the same end result, and not resulted in societal disapproval or the wrath of Hannah. Which may be part of the point. There also seems to be a theme of the difference between the inhabitants of Manila and Baguio, though the specifics are unclear to a foreign audience.
This is demonstrated near the start, when Hannah demonstrates her bad-ass credentials by dealing with a couple of obnoxious tourists in a store. Her eventual fate is an interesting reversal on, say, I Spit On Your Grave, where the victim was out of the big city, and fell prey to the local yokels. When it eventually comes time for, first, survival and then payback, she does not mess around. However, I couldn’t help wishing the film had followed suit, and been considerably more direct. Getting to its cathartic punishment phase about an hour earlier, would have been preferable. I’d rather watch young Filipino rapists get hacked apart with sickles, than sit around exchanging chit-chat.