I went into Smaller and Smaller Circles blind, having not read the original source material by F.H. Batacan beforehand. My perspective is thus limited only by the film, and while it seems to follow some of the elements of a crime thriller, the film evolves into something more profound by its closing credits.
The film follows forensic anthropologists Father Gus Saenz and Jerome Lucero as they investigate a spate of grisly deaths in Payatas. The victims are young boys, their bodies horribly mutilated. They race against time before the killer kills anew, but at every turn the system is turned against them.
Those versed in the mystery genre will immediately notice something off about the film. For one thing, it does not follow the conventions of the genre that many are accustomed to. A very crucial piece of evidence - that the murders are being committed on the first Saturdays of the month - is not treated with much fanfare. The killer's identity is deducible if one pays close attention, though the film does leave an ample supply of red herrings for the viewer to follow. Most of the first half hour burns slowly, and numerous subplots seem detached from the main plot. It is when we look closer at what the film is trying to say when the film starts to make a lot more sense. Smaller and Smaller Circles is not (just) about a serial killer, but a society that creates serial killers, a society where these killings are but a small part of a larger and more cancerous social malady.
The film examines this cancer under the microscope, revealing its metastatic spread throughout society. We have become a people obsessed with outside appearances, often resorting to shortcuts and lies instead of facing inconvenient truths. We see a society demarcated sharply by class, with people in power capable both of good and unspeakable evil. And with such power comes systems of abuse, institutionalized and almost made tradition for the sake of perpetuating said power. It manifests even at the very start of the film, where Saenz laments the fact that the abuser he's been chasing for years has managed to evade justice, with the abuser being reassigned instead of being prosecuted and jailed.
Raya Martin's films have always challenged cinematic convention, often trying to reconcile our history and the postcolonial realities of the present day. In perhaps the same way he used the aesthetic of early Hollywood and silent movies in films like Independencia (2009) and A Short Film about the Indio Nacional (2005), Martin uses elements of the crime genre as a means to reflect on our painful history.
Though subject to a more mainstream treatment, his influence seeps into the film's infrastructure. For example, he plays with temporality: the film takes place in 1997, but it is not explicitly stated as such. For all I knew the film could have easily taken place in the present day. The killings are juxtaposed with echoes of atrocities committed during Martial Law, memories largely forgotten in place of a sanitized, 'bloodless' version. The past and the present meld and become one, and within it lies the tragedy of our people.
Many have said (and rather eloquently so) that Martin's films try to evoke a sense of national identity. In that regard, I come back to a certain part in the film where Fr. Lucero remarks on the method of killing. The boys' faces, hearts and genitals have been removed - everything that, in Lucero's words, "makes them human." He notes that this is due to the killer depersonalizing his victims, or perhaps, himself through them. I'm not very familiar with the term in a criminal profiling or sociological context, but I am familiar with the psychological definition of the term: the disappearance of self, a sensation of detachment from the world, a feeling of unreality, dislocation and vagueness, and looking at the world as an observer.
In many ways, we as a country have undergone a sense of national depersonalization, trapped in a sense of unreality, viewing the rest of our own selves through a pane of glass, catalyzed through deep and lasting trauma. In many ways, we are the killer, dehumanized by years of abuse and left to dehumanize others. And in many ways as well we are Father Saenz, observing from the outside, trying to reconcile the realities of the world.
Perhaps one would think that the film is mired in cynicism, that it shows the futility in doing good in a society drenched in darkness. But that is not the case at all. During the last part of the film, Saenz is visited by his journalist friend, Joanna, who presents him with another case of murdered children. Saenz looks tired and ready to give up, but Joanna quotes Voltaire at him: Il faut laisser aller le monde comme il va, "We need to let the world go the way it is." In Voltaire's original story, Le Monde Comme Il Va, the protagonist Babouc is tasked by the powerful being Ituriel to observe Persepolis, if Ituriel should destroy a city full of evil men and evil deeds. Babouc realizes that one can have a compromise with the world: tout n'y est pas or et diamants - "all is not gold or diamonds." While it can be interpreted as a sense of venality or resignation, with it comes the notion that there is still wisdom and beauty in the good that men try to do, a notion that evokes William Somerset's words at the end of David Fincher's Se7en (1995) when he quotes Hemingway:
""The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part."
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