Aswang

This country, the 2019 film Aswang says, is a land of fear.

It is a film seen through the eyes of our countrymen, and not through the eyes of an outsider or a passive observer. There are no monoliths, no personalities set up to be martyrs, just people and their pain. And there is so much pain to be had.

This is a kingdom where the rulers are boogeymen, their presence deeply felt even though, in this film, they are not seen at all, their names unsaid. The film isn't about them; this is a film about the war that they have waged upon society's most vulnerable. To them, it is an easy war, perhaps even in their warped minds, a just one.

This is a kingdom of corpses, both living and dead, forgotten in morgues or left to rot behind secret doors, all trapped in dark prisons, the result of laws and non-laws that value extermination over rehabilitation. The monster's words kill indiscriminately, but these words are a remedy that kills the infection but neglects the abscess that fuels it. 

This is a kingdom of silence, where people no longer hear, a land of the bereaved. Their grief is lost in this silence, except to those who still bear to listen.

This is the land of the blind, where indiscriminate death has become a fact of life. This blindness is sometimes willful, a refusal to see out of blind faith. But there is light in the darkness. Even in the land of the blind, there are some that dare to open their eyes.