Dan Villegas' Uninvited (Warner Bros. Pictures, Mentorque Productions, Project 8, 2024) has a big curious twist. The twist is Vilma Santos, the person herself, that the most becalmed and cognitive of movie stars would chose to appear in a revenge flick, that most crass of exploitation genres. Moreover, Villegas has followed behind. They have taken a long look at exploitation revenge pictures and have decided their pedigree alone could elevate such material, literally. They may be right. But that's somewhat unfair. Uninvited is never cheap - righteousness is complicated here. Uninvited, which was refashioned with a major hand from Santos, is a thinly veiled retrospective of her career. The tale is told in jumbled flashbacks, as if nonlinear narrative were a reward in itself. It's not. Uninvited squanders plot impetus and even with constant crosscutting it's lethargically paced, slogging through soap-operatic back stories and maddening irrelevancies. I was eagerly awaiting the chance to watch this film. It seemed a decidedly eclectic mix of action hero with a dash of cerebral stimulation thrown in. Santos’ character, Lilia Capistrano/Eva Candelaria for the majority of the film, is aloof from the viewer. Her reluctance to communicate in anything other than tormented expressions (it seems odd on the stern face of Santos, who has always looked old) and stone cold staring means that at no point do we ever connect with her in a way that will make us care for her like we probably should. Santos, it must be said, delivers another performance that is controlled, but it’s the frustrating lack of intimacy with her situation that, for me, makes this film feel flat. Give her credit for stepping into an exercise this provocative, but an exercise is what it remains, the itch to blast away too easily steadied by the itch to reassure.
Villegas seems to have relied more on the audience's perception of the situation than trying to give us any kind of real meaning. The fact that we know how we would act in this situation, will predispose us to feel one way or another about Lilia's own predicament; it provokes ideas in our own memory that stand in the way of anything in the film being fresh or new. And Villegas seems unable to redress that imbalance. By being biased to the situation, we are unable to see past the actions of the protagonist as anything other than simplistic, clichéd emotional churlishness. Unfortunately, the plotting is rather pedestrian and often flawed, undermining this film’s potential for greatness. By the time the big moment arrives when Lilia faces Guilly Vega (Aga Muhlach) who raped and murdered her daughter, Lily (Gabby Padilla) and irreversibly changed her life, it’s clear what kind of movie Uninvited ultimately wants to be. Without giving anything away, let’s just say that the film is completely drained of any remaining irony at this point, abandoning intellectual honesty in favor of giving the viewer what they want. It elicits no real sympathy for Lilia, who in the revenge process turns into a cartoonish character. And even though it ends with some hope that our heroine can find redemption, it all seemed like just a futile exercise in grandstanding for Villegas who seemed to care less about the justice system. What Uninvited tries so hard to deliver and what it ultimately fails at, is generating sympathy for our main character. With top class production values, Uninvited should have been a cut above your standard revenge thriller. Lilia should get revenge and we should feel satisfied vicariously. Yet while the story does conclude more or less the way it ought to, it doesn’t have the feeling of catharsis that a revenge thriller needs. Somewhere over the course of Uninvited, most of the flavor has gone out.
Directed By: Dan Villegas
Written By: Dodo Dayao, FSG
Director of Photography: Pao Orendain, LPS
Production Designer: Michaela Tatad-King
Film Editor: Marya Ignacio
Musical Scorer: Len Calvo
Sound Designer: Allen Roy Santos
