Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Dodo Dayao
Starring: Jasmine Curtis-Smith,Anthony Falcon, Glaiza de Castro, Dino
Pastrano
In similar fashion to Brad Anderson's
Vanishing on 7th Street, David F Sandberg's
Lights Out
and the X-Files episode 'Darkness Falls', Filipino
filmmaker Dodo Dayao's second feature,
Midnight in a Perfect World, is another horror narrative in which darkness itself cloaks some form
of threat.
The movie has a simple, high concept premise. At midnight each night,
random sections of Manila fall under darkness. The lights go out, or
rather light goes out. Not only do electrical light sources fail, but so
too does natural light. As one character horrifyingly observes, even the
moon seems to disappear from the heavens above.
Stories abound of people disappearing after being caught in such
blackouts. The government has installed a series of "safe houses" around
the city in which people can take refuge should they find themselves
caught out by the darkness. After a night of taking hallucinogenic
drugs, a group of young people avail of one such house, though one of
their friends gets lost in the blackness outside.
While his film boasts a simple genre premise, Dayao seems to have
higher, artier aspirations. It takes almost half the movie for the main
plotline to kick in, and before that we're left watching its characters
have a series of obtuse interactions that don’t seem to add a whole lot
to the overall story. Once the blackout begins and Dayao's film enters
the horror realm, it becomes a laboured affair. It mostly consists of
characters wandering through the darkness with only the lights from
their phones to guide their way. This raises the question of how their
phone lights are working when the blackout seemingly erases all other
light, even that of the moon?
Perhaps on purpose, Dayao confuses things by having his protagonists
stoned off their heads. On the one hand it adds considerably to their
paranoia and in one effectively trippy sequence the safe house's
wallpaper seems to come alive, but it leaves the viewer wondering
whether all of this is a drug trip or if our protagonists are really in
any danger from some supernatural threat.
Those of us who don’t reside in the Philippines may well feel like
we're missing some cultural context. We might hazard a guess that the
blackout may be an allegory for the Duterte regime's heavy-handed war on
drugs and quashing of civil liberties, but who knows? Unintentionally,
Midnight in a Perfect World does reflect the pandemic era,
with groups of people ignoring curfews and government guidance to party
in secret lock-ins. You won't need to be from the Philippines for that
to strike a resonant chord.
