Cinema One Originals: Violator

It's probably just the luck of the draw, but I managed to get on that particular day when most of the films on the day's program are horror, post-apocalyptic, or something of that sort.

Violator is a curious little film: even now, 12 hours after seeing it, I'm still trying to process it. At times I felt like I was watching two different movies.

The first half of the film introduces the main characters, interspersed with seemingly unrelated happenings throughout the city. This patchwork of scenes or vignettes builds a steady atmosphere of dread that builds to the second half. To say that these scenes are creepy is an understatement. The first half of this film is probably the creepiest thing I've seen in cinema for a long time. The scenes are unsettling, and there's a constant feeling that something is just... off. This culminates in a series of scenes, mostly silent and shot with what looks like an old handycam, that really eats at you (I'm still getting that unsettling feeling thinking about it 12 hours later.)

The atmosphere really reminds me of old Harmony Korine, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo or Sion Sono where things aren't overtly scary, just really, really unsettling. This atmosphere of almost nihilistic dread isn't too related to the plot, but it really works in setting up the second half.

Enterprising (or just curious) moviegoers might have come across the short synopsis of the film. A good majority of that actually takes place in the second half of Violator, which is far more conventional. Joel Lamangan basically proves that while I'm not a fan of his films, he's one hell of an actor.

So do both halves work together? At first glance it seems like a disjointed mess would be expected, but it somehow works. It does leave a lot of questions unanswered and I wish that the characters could have been developed more than what little time they were given in the last hour of the film, but despite its faults it's quite a remarkable film. There are some images that I will probably never unsee - like that one at the beginning of the post. *shudder*