Mike De Leon’s Kisapmata was the Best Picture winner at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival. Watching it right after an earlier MMFF winner, Celso Ad Castillo’s Burlesk Queen, is an instructive experience. Burlesk Queen is big, bold and messy; Kisapmata is small, timorous and tightly controlled. This is not a criticism of De Leon’s movie but a description of its form — you can almost feel the walls closing in. At times it becomes hard to breathe.
The viewer’s first impression is that Kisapmata is a horror movie. The theme music is reminiscent of Bernard Hermann’s score for Psycho, and the house where much of the story transpires is shot like a classic movie haunted house. All it lacks is a dog baying at the moon.
A short prologue tells us that the movie is based on true events. Right at the start, we are prepared for violence. (The movie is said to be based on a piece of crime reportage by Nick Joaquin called “The House on Zapote Street.”)
The young woman played by Charo Santos tells her father, played by Vic Silayan, that she plans to marry a co-worker. She is clearly scared; it’s taking all her courage to make her announcement. Her mother (Charito Solis) is scared, too; see how she steers clear of Vic Silayan, as though he might bite her. Without being told, she takes an ice pack out of the refrigerator and nervously hands it to him. The father asks the daughter a series of questions — his calm, reasonable manner is more terrifying than if he were to yell and throw furniture. The late Vic Silayan had a commanding presence and a voice one dared not argue with. Here, playing a retired policeman and domineering father, he is at his most intimidating.
This is a movie about secrets, about terrible things that happen behind closed doors and traumas no one dares discuss. The scenes are closely-shot and tightly-framed, the world reduced to the four walls of a room. We share the daughter’s oppression; there is literally nowhere to hide from this awful man.
The first meeting between the father and the fiancé (Jay Ilagan) takes place in the basement, where the old man is tending to his earthworm farm. He fondles the wriggling creatures and addresses them like children. In the dark, dank basement that the light cannot reach. The symbolism may be a bit obvious, the approach too Grand Guignol in an otherwise straightforward movie, but it is effective. Later, the younger man confronts the father while he’s tending to his pigs. We get it: he’s a beast.
The screenplay by Clodualdo del Mundo, Racquel Villavicencio and De Leon is spare and free of over-explanation. You want Aristotelian unity, you got it. Charo Santos is entirely credible as a woman completely under her father’s control. At first her refusal to escape from his clutches seems perverse — we are as mystified as her new husband. When her father contrives to cancel her honeymoon, she doesn’t seem unduly annoyed. But when her father’s demands become more and more unreasonable, she tries to put up some resistance. We begin to understand how a capable woman could allow another person to run her life. She’s not only afraid, she feels complicit. The victim believes that she is also guilty.
Jay Ilagan is compelling as the young man who has no idea of the weirdness he’s gotten himself into. Without giving away the plot, I will say the situation goes far beyond strict parenting. (Ilagan’s early death is a tragedy the movies still haven’t recovered from. Who today has the intelligence and irony that he brought to his roles?)
Charito Solis seems too intense for a woman who has been beaten down for decades. Her fear is a bit overplayed, and her personality too forceful for a domestic martyr. But then we’ve heard of so many battered women who “just don’t seem the type.”
Of course Vic Silayan dominates the movie. Often he doesn’t even have to use that voice — a small gesture, a look, is enough to melt the other characters’ resolve. Kisapmata brilliantly employs the conventions of the horror movie — the music, the heavy tread on the stairs, the rattling lock and wide-eyed expressions of terror. He is the monster at its core, its loathsome creature lurking in the dark.
The end is shocking and perfect.
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