Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino 2018 | Madilim ang Gabi's night is pitch black

As we enter the second year of President Duterte's drug war, several works of media have surfaced to document the lives of the people living under this deadly war. Some are obviously skewed propaganda, others are more nuanced and truthful. Adolf Alix's Madilim ang Gabi takes us deep into the darkness of this war, whether we are prepared for it or not.

The film begins inconspicuously with a birthday celebration. A local small time drug dealer, Lando (Philip Salvador) celebrates along with his wife Sara (Gina Alajar) and adult son Alan (Felix Roco). The festivities are broken with the sound of gunfire and a freshly minted corpse. This occurrence is now commonplace, close yet emotionally distant to the couple. Alajar's character even wears a Duterte/Cayetano wristband, the cognitive dissonance in full force. The couple decide to quit the trade as things are getting hairy, but that is interrupted when Alan disappears, and the couple is left to search for their missing son.

As it turns out, Sara and Lando have a dark past, and the events surrounding Alan force them to go back to those dark roots. This is a world devoid of justice, where no one is morally in the right, and people are forced to do bad things because of survival, or necessity, or orders from above. Yet this also begs asking for an answer to the paradox of how we can elicit change through showing social realities. The facts in Madilim ang Gabi are well known to the Filipino people. Are we that dense? In fact, a few scenes seem a bit too much; a scene at the local morgue piles on one grieving family member after another that it threatens to cross into silliness. Is it defeatist to not offer hope, or merely realistic?

Any resolution to that question is up to the individual viewer. In the meantime, Madilim ang Gabi gives us something to chew on. It's a lot more objective than the dreck that other people have offered to local audiences, but one may question its utility. At times it feels like a film geared more for the foreign festival circuit than for people like us, as a tool for creating awareness rather than a tool for  effecting change.