There's a a disarming playfulness to Roderick Cabrido's Purgatoryo (Purple Pig, Waning Crescent Arts, One Big Fight Productions, Monoxide Works, One Dash Zero, Quezon City Film Development Commission, 2016) that pulls you in, even (or especially) at its most grotesque moments. The pleasures are intellectual as well as visceral. Purgatoryo spends a fair amount of time unpacking its own premise keeping the exposition from sounding too much like exposition. Shadowy forces are waging war deterring anyone from embracing newfound possibilities. Funeral parlor owner Violet (Bernardo Bernardo) is tied up with local cop Jojo (Arnold Reyes), but it’s the immediacy of the storyline involving On-on (Kristoffer King) and Dyograd (Jess Mendoza) that makes it impossible to write off the film as a show of fan service. Cabrido makes brilliant use of Bernardo, there’s great tenderness in his performance. What Cabrido has to say lays on the line with few of the blandishments of popular movies and little of the aesthetic care of art-house ones. Cabrido and his production designer Steff Dereja are adept at telling their story visually. The plot contributes to the film’s general sense of weightlessness, as if the story itself is uncertain of how to evolve from one scene to the next and overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of possibilities. Sometimes this atmosphere of pervasive, never-fully-explained enigma feels rich with ambivalent meanings, other times it’s maddeningly vague. The last act, especially, is abruptly truncated. We never learn what happened to at least one major character, or the reason another met the fate he did. No matter, all of Cabrido’s subplots and asides are juicy with meaning.
This high definition transfer is noticeably darker and burnished looking with an emphasis on almost yellow-orange tones that can give things a painterly air. The film's rather bracing stylistic quirks are nicely rendered here adding skewed perspectives and various hues basically drenching the frame with detail levels remarkably intact throughout. The material also has excellent contrast and detail levels, despite a somewhat psychedelic approach that can superimpose image on image and the like. There are a number of hallucinatory moments in Purgatoryo which probably don't have the same kind of wow factor that, say, a contemporary multilayered enterprise might offer, but there is still appealing immersion with both clear panning effects and discrete placement of individual effects in some of the visionary moments in particular. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Bryan Dumaguina's ethereal score in particular sounds beautifully full bodied and spacious. The ideas that Cabrido puts forth are powerful and poignant. It’s drama of a vision at the end of the line as he knew it. Even in death, Purgatoryo hears the faint sounds of harmony.
Directed By: Roderick Cabrido
Screenplay: Denise O'Hara, Joseph Israel Laban
Cinematographers: Mycko David, Cesca Lee
Production Designer: Steff Dereja
Editor: Mark Cyril Bautista
Sound Design: Yves G. Patron
Music: Bryan Dumaguina
