REVIEW: 'Uninvited' is unexpectedly daring, offbeat, brazen
Warning: This review contains spoilers from Uninvited.
Don’t be misled by Uninvited's rather uneventful, low-decibel trailer. This revenge thriller goes surprisingly hard in its pulpier elements, especially for a film with such a top heavy cast of classic, high-profile, mainstream stars.
Uninvited is so unblinking in its violent outbursts. The movie makes Tagos ng Dugo and Sa Aking Mga Kamay, the previous forays into the genre by leads Vilma Santos and Aga Muhlach, seem like child’s play in comparison.
Unlike those 1987 and 1998 films, though, this one is so much less a dark psychological drama about trauma and more of a straightforward vengeance tale about a mother out for blood as she hunts down the people who took her child’s life. This storyline gives the film another delicious layer of throwback kitsch, calling to mind Angela Markado, the 1980 Filipino classic based on a comics serial about a woman going after the men who gang raped her. It also easily recalls the real-life 1993 abduction-rape-murder case involving college students Eileen Sarmenta and Allan Gomez and then-Mayor of Calauan, Laguna, Antonio Sanchez, which led to his conviction and prison sentence.
The latter gives Uninvited some of its chilling gravitas and while the film largely stays in the realm of fiction, there’s a sense that its vigilante justice narrative is a response to the Duterte administration’s 6-year reign of terror and extrajudicial killings amid its bloody war on drugs. This is perhaps one of the biggest reasons why the movie’s final act, however outlandish it is, feels like such a big, satisfying release. It would’ve been a total triumph of activist cinema had director Dan Villegas and writer Dodo Dayao pushed it some more and made pointedly, expressly political commentaries. That said, their takedown of the intoxicating allure of wealth, the wild excesses of the powerful, and the complicity of the people around them to their misuse of that wealth and abuse of that power is striking.
Nonetheless it’s such a thrill to see the likes of Santos, Muhlach, and Nadine Lustre, some of the biggest stars of their generations, come together for such a daring, offbeat, and unexpectedly brazen enterprise. They all play against type, brilliantly at that. Muhlach is particularly noteworthy. He hasn’t done anything even close to the maniacally unhinged and corrupt billionaire businessman he essays here and yet he nails it with scrappy wit and surprising restraint, avoiding the usual trappings of playing such monstrous characters with “actorly” grandiloquence. It’s a revelatory performance and one of the best in his long, highly decorated career.
Uninvited is not the kind of merry and bright party the Metro Manila Film Festival usually serves up, and while it takes a bit of time to really get going, there is a lot of juicy stuff to chew on—from the uniformly excellent acting and The Godfather-inspired cinematography to the fluid editing and the intoxicating musical score—before it gets to its crazy climax. Feel free to invite yourselves to it.
Uninvited opens in Philippine cinemas on Dec. 25 as part of the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival. Watch one of its official teaser trailers below.
