Uninvited (Dan Villegas, 2024)

Gatecrasher

Dan Villegas' Uninvited (2024) with a script by Dodo Dayao is unashamed to flaunt its pulp-fiction credentials, everything from Tarantino's Kill Bill to Ferrara's Ms. 45 to Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (from which Tarantino stole much of Kill Bill) to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black-- the Woman Seeking Revenge flick is a suitably disreputable genre that merits revisiting time and time again, if only to allow a director to get his rocks off exercising his filmmaking chops. 

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Screenwriter Dayao does try for more than mere exercise; there's care and craft to the characters, from Vilma Santos' schoolteacher Lilia Capistrano, who shows genuine warmth and rapport with her daughter Lilly (Gabby Padilla); to billionaire Guilly Vega (Aga Muhlach) and his knottier more turbulent relationship with his daughter Nicole (Nadine Lustre); to side characters like Katrina (Mylene Dizon), Guilly's perennially unsatisfied wife; to Jigger (RK Bagatsing) the top lieutenant caught between his employer's perennially unsatisfied wife and his (perversely jealous) employer; to Colonel Red (Tirso Cruz lll), Guilly's sinister and not unenvious crime-lord rival. Dayao's script traces the Vega's web of relationships, sketching out a family much like any wealthy family not untainted by the big business of crime, an entertainingly Filipino parody of the Sopranos-- or (better yet), the Borgias.   

Santos does best in the early half, when her Lilia is working undercover trying to suss out her daughter's captors; the way she reacts and works to suppress her reactions as she learns the increasingly horrifying details of the kidnapping is a masterclass in restrained acting. Gabby Padilla's Lilly is the opposite: totally guileless and uncorrupted, you can see how she might appeal to a predator like Guilly, a particularly fresh and toothsome sacrificial offering for him to feast upon and savor.

Lustre's Nicole is world-weary decadent yet unhappy with her status quo, an unstable combination that helps sell the idea she might be ready for something better-- or at least something different, some way to cut through all the unbearable bullshit in her life. Presented alongside Lily's purer alloy it's easy to say Lustre upstages Padilla but the more interesting answer is to say they're really mirror images, middle class respectability vs. upper class hedonism, with consequences unleashed when their two worlds collide. 

The film hums along smoothly for most of its running time; where the plot starts to unravel is with the climactic party itself, when Lilia invites herself (hence the title) to Guilly's 55th birthday party, family and friends all present to celebrate. Suddenly we're asked to believe Lilia, who's trained years for this night, is badass enough to go into the party unarmed, no gun or weapon in her purse; suddenly we're asked to believe Santos, a to be fair reasonably fit senior (and still strikingly handsome at that) can acquit herself like an action star. 

The results are... unconvincing. I know I know Helen Mirren did something similar in Red and the sequel Red 2 but 1) Mirren did it at the relatively younger age of  65 while Ms Santos is pushing northward of seven decades, and 2) Mirren did it with the resources of a big Hollywood production, with plenty of coverage employing carefully flattering angles, with months to assemble the footage into a professional-looking action flick; Santos and her director Villegas had at most the resources of a small Filipino studio trying to finish in time for the Metro Manila Film Festival-- the comparison is unfair.

And yet and yet and yet-- somehow the ungainly thing remains ungodly fun, and a huge reason for this is Aga Mulach's Guilly Vega. Never been a fan of Mulach; I remember sitting down to Lino Brocka's Miguelito: Batang Rebelde (Miguelito: Boy Rebel) hoping to watch a young man turn into a serious actor and instead coming away remembering Nida Blanca's unforgettable performance as Miguelito's mother Auring; I remember Mulach's attempt to play a serial killer in Sa Aking Mga Kamay (In My Own Hands)-- can't remember much of that, save the blood makeup was particularly unpersuasive. Maybe it's the years of experience maybe just age but suddenly the handsome babycheeked face of the teenaged hearthrob has curdled into the jowly silvermaned features of a raging megalomaniac, his power and prestige giving him not just untouchability but vast reach as he looms over much of Filipino society. 

And it's not just that Guilly's a sociopathic monster; it's that he's a charming often hilariously witty monster. His party speech where he declares victory over father and grandfather thanks to the mere fact that he's outlived them recalls The Apprentice when it becomes clear to both Fred Trump and Roy Cohn that their biological and spiritual son has not only outgrown them but discarded them as worse than useless in his life. One wonders if perhaps screenwriter Dayao was channeling the United States' current presidential elect when he conceived of Guilly-- the arrogance! The sense of entitlement! The... implied feelings towards his daughter.

A word on that moment in the film: Filipino melodramas like to throw in a little incest to spice up the unrepentant perversity of a character, a lazy way of saying "This is a bad person." The filmmakers look at a film like Polanski's Chinatown or Mike de Leon's Kisapmata and think "I must top this," and the results feel more cheap than genuinely shocking; that's because Polanski and De Leon apply the suggestion lightly instead of smearing it all over the screen. What Dayao does is different: he leans into the comic grotesqueness of Guilly's desire for his daughter, with Mulach leaning into Lustre's face like Kong leaning into Fay Wray's, the nakedly expressed lust horrifying and hilarious at the same time (Lustre's unenthusiastic response making for a nice counterpoint). The scene doesn't quite undo one's memory of the two classic films... but does stand up to the comparison, unembarrassed. I can think of no higher praise. 

One more note: the detail where Guilly squeals as he's being stabbed-- like 'a stuck pig,' to quote a De Palma film, the squeals segueing into Lilia's desperate wheezes as she plunges the knife down again and again-- that, I thought, was a not unimaginative use of sound, the victim aurally echoing the victor. No, Uninvited is no unabashed masterpiece but does build up nicely, with a climax not without its memorable moments. And Aga was an undeniable pleasure.