Elwood Perez's Esoterika: Maynila (T. Rex Productions, Film Development Council of the Philippines, Tribute Entertainment, 2015) is funny, shocking and spectacularly turbo-charged. It creates a scary and beguiling electricity by allowing opposites to collide, horror and joy, colorful fantasy and grimy reality, history and hyper-modernity. The narrative structure of Esoterika: Maynila is perfect for a director like Perez, allowing himself to fast-forward between dramatic episodes at will and freeing him from the need to dwell too intimately on the finer shades of his characters' personalities. He's always been a filmmaker keener to play with form and tweak with tempo than to explore the complexities of human psychology. Yet the film, for all its breathless intensity rarely subverts expectations and in its final section never fails to grip or delight.
It's easy to sense the excitement that Perez and his cinematographers Justin Santos and Japo Parcero felt while filming around Manila. They're alive to the jagged rhythms of the city, its palette of colors that are rich and surreal. The metropolis in Esoterika: Maynila is brighter and livelier than any we've seen before. Perez is a gifted stylist and, for better or worse, an indiscriminate sensualist, the kind of filmmaker capable of finding tactile pleasure wherever he looks. For the director, the city is above all, an endless source of motion and color. Perez has always been an energetic filmmaker, but in Esoterika: Maynila, he whips himself up to a state of euphoric intensity. It roots itself in a cynicism-free celebration of fate, love and social camaraderie, conveyed with big, bold colors and extreme camera angles.
Screenplay: Elwood Perez, Jessica Zafra
Cinematography: Justin Santos, Japo Parcero
Editing: George Jarlego
Musical Score: Nolan Diosana
Sound Supervision: Jethro Joaquin
Directed By: Elwood Perez
