‘Silong’ Review: Worth the risks

Intriguingly, Silong is far from precise, yet it works. The film has loose ends and loopholes, and its narrative is obviously a bit of a stretch. Directors Jeffrey Hidalgo and Roy Sevilla Ho, however, manage to tie things together by their sheer earnestness and their confidence in a lopsided story that is far too tangled for a market that can only be contented by formulaic thrills.

 

The result is this sometimes frustrating but always engaging guessing game, a puzzle that is as astoundingly entertaining as it is stubbornly bizarre.

Shape shifter

The plot goes like this: a doctor (Piolo Pascual), slowly recovering from the death of his wife and the debts left by his broken family, is suddenly urged to provide shelter to a battered wife (Rhian Ramos) who is running away from her influential husband. Romance awkwardly ensues, infusing the film with certain notions of charm and delight, before abandoning everything for a darker streak right in the very end.

A shape shifter of a film, Silong thrusts its layered tale of closeted lunacies in a world hopeless romantics and damsels in distress. Its mood is rightly inconsistent, morphing from the giddiness of an asinine fairy tale between sudden lovers into a hideous nightmare.

In a way, Silong seems to think of itself as a parable of married life. It assumes its characters as sweethearts ready to assume a life together, against all odds. They go through the motions of infatuation and courtship until trust is questioned and secrets are revealed, just like in a marriage, only in the case of the film, the deceptions are gravely exaggerated.

Breaking stereotypes

It is a film about stereotypes, and breaking them.

At its center is a man conflicted by his inability to fulfil the obligations of the stereotypical husband. The woman that suddenly enters his life is also a stereotype, a needy female who is all too ready to fill the empty holes of a man who seems to deserve a second chance in life. Their romantic folly rightly reeks of convention and predictability.

Pascual has played men whose devotion to love has always been sort of twisted such as in Jerry Lopez Sineneng’s Esperanza: The Movie (1999), Mel Chionglo’s Lagarista (2000), Olivia Lamasan’s Milan (2004), and Joyce Bernal’s Paano Kita Iibigin (2007). Here, he portrays the role of a man with dangerous repressions with a clever mix of charming gloom and peril, switching from being the familiar matinee idol to a doubtful fiend quite seamlessly.

Ramos, on the other hand, seems to favor being a delicate seductress. Her swift shift into a more aggressive character right in the end dangerously throws the entire picture off its course. Thankfully, the risks pay off. There is something about her performance that makes everything irreverently comical, especially in the way how her character, without need of suspense or drama, emasculates Pascual, who presents himself as this holier-than-thou saviour of women.

Domestic horror

It is a film that justifies its twists. When the film breaks away from the gross charms of being another love story between fractured individuals to turn into a vicious and violent document of a woman rampaging against her male partner, it evolves into something that resembles a feminist outburst.

The film, still not content with its sudden mutations, morphs again. This time, it retreats from its feminist pretensions, and goes back into the warped mind of the man. In its final spectacle, Silong cements its adoration for stereotypes by completing its characterization of a man who commits to the gender roles of society, at whatever ghastly cost.

Silong works because it is adamantly absurd. It handsomely recreates an alternate universe where the deranged can shroud their respective psychoses with swoony looks and perfect smiles. The horror is what’s deftly kept within the masks. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios