Spoilers ahead.

Feng Shui starts with peering shots of the urban poor while Carmina Cuya’s ominous music plays in the background. We see what looks to be actual footage of the homeless spliced with flashes of Catholic imagery and Chinese numismatic charms. 

As the opening credits roll, director Chito Roño already draws a discernible connection between the poor and the pervasiveness of religion and superstition. Catholicism offers a reprieve for the indigent in the hands of a God concerned for those in need of dignified care. But doctrine becomes harder to digest when the decrepit situations the homeless face persist, feeding into the presumed futility of faith in addressing the endless cycle of poverty. 

The Chinese charms subsequently surface, symbols so ubiquitous in Filipino culture that they’ve become ingrained in our social consciousness. Zodiac signs and amulets have become synonymous with relationship advice, financial fortune, and the promise of endless luck. Like religion, it offers solace for the destitute, a pathway for success when all else has failed. But these transcendental beliefs play a dual role aside from its consolatory verses; it mystifies the idea of affluence as an unachievable, lofty, and at times, sinister concept.

Kris Aquino is no stranger to dangerous superstitions. Sukob (2006) unsettles by converting the happiness of marriage into an all-consuming nightmare. Segunda Mano (2011) weaponizes the fear of the unknown by casting suspicion on secondhand items. Dalaw (2010) confronts the taboo of remarrying after being recently widowed. In Feng Shui, which predates all of them, Aquino plays Joy, who encounters a Monkey’s Paw-like curse in the form of a Chinese bagua, sentencing those who look into its mirror to fatal deaths related to their zodiac animals.

The script, penned by Roy Iglesias, taps into the anxieties of the middle class by externalizing how self-interest leads to self-sabotage. At one point, Joy receives a tip from a local geomancer (Joonee Gamboa) on how to break the curse: refuse the good fortune that comes knocking on her door. Joy asks: “Kung ganoon kasimple bakit walang nakapag-isip?” (If the solution was that simple, why didn’t anybody think of it?) to which her friend, Thelma (Ilonah Jean), answers by saying that rejecting luck is easier said than done.

Part of what makes Feng Shui memorable is its Final Destination-esque approach to impending deaths. It can be comical sometimes (getting shot by someone with a dog tattoo), too on-the-nose (a snake killing a security guard inside a village), and occasionally mischievous in its creativity (falling on a stack of Red Horse beer bottles). The casualties in the film aren’t a result of a malevolent ghost or a depraved serial killer; it’s the doing of fate, hiding behind the mask of deep-rooted Chinese superstitions.

Admittedly, there is an issue to be found in using Sino culture and history to motivate the scares in Feng Shui. Firstly, it has little to do with the actual practice of feng shui, which has more to do with optimizing the flow of energy and creating balance for harmonious living rather than the discount ouija death note the film seems to think it is. Giving lotus feet (who was inspired by the torturous practice of foot binding in China) and other Chinese customs stereotypical horror makeovers risk cultural prejudice, a topic this editorial touches on. 

For me, the effective scares do not come from the film’s Filipino-Chinese connections; it lies more in how it unnerves the middle class from their life of luxury, showing cracks in the seams of gated communities and interrogating their faith in fate. 

Ironically, for a character named Joy, her endless fortunes do nothing to assuage her unhappiness. Her husband (Jay Manalo) continues to cheat on her, her children (John Vladimir Manalo and Julianne Gomez) are still dissatisfied with their cushioned lifestyle, and her mother-in-law (Daria Ramirez) continues to disfavor her.

Cherry Pie Picache, who plays the wife of the previous bagua owner, makes an appearance and requests that Joy return the item to her. Her house is big and opulent, flaunting a sense of self-importance and higher class. Without any words spoken, it’s made clear that this could also be Joy’s life. 

Joy denies the plea to have the bagua returned; it turns out even she is not exempt from temptation. Feng Shui takes this characterization and uses it as a mirror against the audience. It asks: would we also make the same transaction? The life of others versus the life of decadence? 

This also paints the rich, those who have seemingly overcome poverty (or simply had the benefit of not being born into adversity), as even more inaccessible. The richest families in the Philippines (coincidentally, almost half of them hail from the Chinese diaspora) have become so wealthy and powerful to the point that their stories are mythologized. Never mind the persistent issues of contractualization, the mass displacement of families, and the cruel land grabbing — it’s the alleged “cost” to pay for good fortune. 

What’s frightening is that ordinary Filipinos, impinged by long work hours and menial pay, still have the capacity to turn a blind eye to this kind of injustice. The enduring presence of the Yamashita gold myth to explain the endless pit of the Marcoses’ wealth is an easier, much more palatable pill to swallow for them than the mountain’s worth of evidence compiled by government agencies saying otherwise. Most of it is due to misinformation, but part of it is also the inability to imagine a prosperous path through sheer labor alone, and so it’s comforting to believe that those who succeed must be blessed by a mystic force that is beyond comprehension.

“The mythical treasure [Yamashita gold] might be seen as a repressed hope for future economic rewards,” Dr. Piers Kelly writes. “In circumstances of hardship and dramatic wealth-inequality, the discovery of lost treasure becomes a plausible explanation for why one family is rich while their neighbors remain poor.”

This brings us back to religion and superstition, which underpin the soothing falsehoods that palliate the disenfranchised. Feng Shui says that to become rich, you must surrender your morals and prepare to have others bear the brunt of your self-interest. The horror in the film functions as a cautionary tale and a nihilistic commentary. The poor are in a lose-lose situation, cursed to play along the games of an unfair society, while those above risk very little. 

In the end, Joy’s predicament is terrifying not because of the spirits from the dead haunting her, but because resisting the urges of good fortune evades even the best of us — especially in this country. – Rappler.com

Feng Shui is now streaming on Netflix.