REVIEW: 'Bahay na Pula' (2022, Brillante Mendoza)
Brillante Mendoza has recently been doing projects with Vivamax, which has been churning out mostly soft porn movies.
Bahay na Pula is Mendoza’s third Vivamax movie in just two months, and his second attempt at supernatural horror after the critically panned Sapi in 2013.
Known for his cinema verité works, including the 2009 Cannes-winning Kinatay, Mendoza fails to trigger any sense of dread, terror or anticipation in Bahay na Pula. It can’t even be classified as horror — in the same way you can’t call The Notebook (2004) a slapstick comedy.
Bahay na Pula is a “haunted house” movie based on the real-life “Red House” in San Ildefonso, Bulacan, a former hacienda where Japanese soldiers during World War II kept Filipino women as sex slaves.
In this movie, however, the Red House is in Oriental Mindoro, with Julia Barretto and Xian Lim playing clueless wife and husband Jane and Raffy, respectively.
Mendoza opens the movie with the horror technique of foreshadowing — Jane taking a foolishly lengthy walk through a dangerous construction site where her and Raffy’s dream house is being built.
Construction work on a hot, sunny day doesn’t work well with spooky tracks, which the movie has plenty of. But strange, bothersome things happen: Jane can see the screen of her tablet in an extremely bright environment, and, later on, Raffy hits the brakes of his car — even before seeing why he needs to stop.
Following scenes to augur the coming “horror house,” Jane, now a few weeks pregnant, travel with Raffy to the town of Pola to spend a few days at the Red House (which is, surprise, Jane’s family’s ancestral house) to arrange for its translocation.
With no Airbnb options in Pola, the couple is forced to staycation in the haunted house to fix some legal papers. Strange things continue to happen, like Jane taking a bath wearing the bottom half of her underwear (why?), plus the fact that she has zero knowledge of her ancestral home’s violent history.
A prominent figure is the caretaker, Ising (Erlinda Villalobos), and her realistically rendered giant facial birthmark. She is uneasy over the couple’s presence. But since she elicits the warmth of a caring old yaya, she doesn’t evoke creepy vibes at all.
As soon as the couple arrives, the house awakens an evil spirit: A sepia-colored Japanese soldier (Yoshihiko Tora), who is made to look like a magazine cut-out. Apparently, the harmless-looking Jap, even in his dead (or undead) state, is still a rapist. The moment Jane, a young Filipino woman, enters the house, he’s feeling rapey again.
What has Ising’s connection to all these? The movie wants you to wait — with extreme patience. Because the story branches out into several overlong distractions, like Raffy’s secret life as a corrupt man, and Jane’s ex-lover, Roger (Marco Gumabao), suddenly entering the picture.
For a dash of Vivamax erotica, we see the Jap making love to a sleeping Jane from time to time, and these scenes are staged to look more sexy than scary. Especially when Jane seems to enjoy her nights with the Japanese ghost-slash-incubus. And, strangely, when Jane’s tummy grows abnormally fast, she seems the least perturbed.
Mendoza retains much of his unhurried, docu-style of filmmaking. His camera is like a peeping tom — in this case, the audience wonders if the voyeur is the Red-House incubus, Ising, or their next-door neighbor, a retired old man who spends his days looking out the window.
For his horror, he makes use of dull flashbacks, many foreshadowing and naked butts — plus an overusage of horror sound effects in scenes without tension. The snake from Sapi (the one that emerged from the vagina of Meryll Soriano’s character) makes a surprising cameo here, serving as either a phallic symbol, or a cthonic representation. It is quite unclear.
Horror has one job: to literally frighten the viewer. If a real horror movie causes terror, thrills and excited screams, the monotonous Bahay na Pula only induces yawns. I hope Mendoza steers clear of this genre and sticks to what he does best: social realism.
0/5 stars
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