REVIEW: ‘Lilim’ is Too Competent for Its Own Good
REVIEW: ‘Lilim’ is Too Competent for Its Own Good
Issa (Heaven Peralejo) is walking in the middle of a dark hallway alone, holding a tiny oil lamp as her light. Photo taken from the film’s official teaser.
Mikhail Red’s latest horror film Lilim is hard to hate.
It has a compelling premise: Set during 1983 in an unspecified part of Northern Luzon, it revolves around a young woman named Issa (Heaven Peralejo) and her kid brother Tomas (Skywalker David) who are trying to escape the law. Issa killed their abusive father, so they are now searching for an orphanage deep in the mountains. It is a safe place they can always go to, a fact mentioned by their mother back when she was alive.
The head nun governing the orphanage allowed them to stay indefinitely, but they don’t receive the warmest of welcomes. Some of the nuns are strict and joyless, having little patience with the children they’re supposed to take care of. As the new kid, Tomas becomes a victim of bullying from the other boys.
And beyond that, they sense something far more stranger is lurking in their new home. Issa slowly becomes curious about what the nuns are doing late at night. Tomas hears of a creature living within the orphanage. The longer they stay, the more they realize they are not quite as safe as they think.
A group of boys are beside each other in the common bedroom, with one of them wearing a mask of a monster. Photo taken from the film’s official page at the International Film Festival Rotterdam
Most of the film is set within the house and Red leans into the simplicity the setup allows. Since Issa and Tomas can’t just leave from the orphanage, much of the scares happen in small rooms, hallways and secret passages. As barren as an underfunded orphanage like this would be, it is adorned with creepy, unfamiliar statues and paintings. The film crafts a cramped & mysterious space the characters have to navigate, one without any exits to be found and the only paths to take lead you closer to evil.
It also moves with efficiency. Nikolas Red edited and wrote the film's screenplay, and he lets the audience hang onto every moment before unleashing that dreaded jump scare (sometimes with a splash of blood and gore to spice it up). The film never stutters, relaying what we need to know at the moment before propelling onto the next story beat.
If it wasn't already obvious above, Red’s films are always a family affair. This time he adds his father Raymond Red — an important Filipino filmmaker himself — into the mix as the film’s cinematographer. He lends a great visual eye to the proceedings, focusing on the performer's faces to capture their gnawing fear or stepping back so we can see how limited their movement is. It also adds to the confined nature of the film, trapping us with the characters.
One of the nuns (Ryza Cenon) looks back at Tomas (Skywalker David) as she takes off her clothes with a knowing grin. Photo taken from the film’s official trailer.
Issa is certainly a likeable lead to be trapped with. It's all thanks to Heaven Peralejo, who is fantastic as another one of Mikhail Red’s plucky heroines. She's clearly troubled with the trauma she carries and the current situation they are in, but she gives Issa a warmth that doesn't lessen her grit and tenacity to protect her brother. Skywalker David does a fine job as the sweet, innocent Tomas, whose precocious nature makes you feel bad about the abuse that he can't seem to escape.
The nuns themselves are terrifying on their own. Eula Valdez leads these nuns and she’s just as commanding as ever. She can lead a sympathetic ear before turning on you in an instant. Ryza Cenon is ferocious and slightly playful as one of the stricter nuns. She stands in contrast with Nicole Omillo, who plays a kind-hearted nun with a more relaxed attitude who hides a more demented streak within her. Phoebe Walker is sadly underused here as one of the sterner nuns, and her role ends up feeling like a reference to the other time she played a nun in a horror movie.
The nuns are also the vessel for Mikhail Red to lay down the point he is trying to make. There are times when Mikhail Red’s films use genre as an excuse to relay the message he wants to impart rather than indulging in the delights of the genre (his psychological horror film Deleter comes to mind). That’s not the case here. The claustrophobia and use of horror movie tropes are there to recreate the oppression and exploitation of the Marcos dictatorship in miniature scale. It reveals how tiny pockets of evil can exist when institutional evils are allowed to persist.
It works so well here since any clean parallels between the supernatural and societal horrors happening during the era are abstracted. He makes us feel those horrors instead, which are effective in communicating what he wants to convey even when you aren’t actively engaging in its themes.
The head nun (Eula Valdez) holds a shotgun, preparing herself for what might attack her. Photo taken from the film’s official page at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Lilim is a film that deserves praise, with Mikhail Red creating another genre film seeped with thrills, social commentary, and technical polish he is known for. Yet even with so much going for it and having written multiple paragraphs praising it, I think the film is just fine.
Part of the problem is that Red overplayed his hand here, showing us what the supernatural being looks like early in the film. This decision undermines the tension he is banking on, since we now know what that creepy hand is attached to. He could’ve let us wallow in the mystery, since it’s scarier to engage with what we don’t know compared to what we do.
But a bigger problem is how Red loves to lean on genre tropes and play them straight. Lilim showcases his mastery of the basics, where he plays all of the hits: a hand reaching out of the shadows, an unfamiliar figure emerging from a doorway, a person being dragged under the bed and so on. He makes them all feel potent, yet there’s a missed opportunity that’s hard to dismiss. All of these are presented so predictably that you can time the exact moment a jump scare would be executed.
Tomas (Skywalker David) fell down a pit, and he’s shocked to see a skeleton. Photo taken from the film’s official trailer.
The line between a bland, derivative film and an intentional throwback like Lilim can be thin, and Red lands on the latter thanks to sheer skill & execution. Yet it’s hard to ignore the dust that comes out every time Red employs these genre tropes. It’s a shame, since the simplicity he employs here could’ve been used to generate jump scares with more novelty and intensity than what we got.
But none of that might matter much. Watching this in a theater with an audience ready to be spooked was so much fun! Red absolutely had the audience at the palm of his hand. They were absolutely terrified, shrieking and cackling at the exact moment they planned. I was always on guard whenever the movie sets up a scare, and despite knowing when something might happen it did make me jump a few times.
Lilim is a chilling crowdpleaser that plays it safe. Its basic competence is a hindrance, blocking the film towards more interesting jumps than what we got. It is content to stick in the shadows, when you can see how the people behind it are capable of making it shine.
