QCinema 2020: Midnight in a Perfect World

 

The "perfect world" of Dodo Dayao's second feature film doesn't look too different compared to ours: young people go out and drink, have fun, go to restaurants and live their lives. But strange things happen at midnight: darkness envelops the cityscape, sirens blare and people vanish. But everything is fine, our protagonists say. As long as it happens to someone else, I'm safe. It all sounds very familiar. Perhaps one of your relatives has told you that with the way things are, they haven't felt safer walking down the streets at night. But is that safety all an illusion?

Like many others have already pointed out, Midnight in a Perfect World deconstructs the very idea of "safety". The horror genre, then, is the perfect way to express the loss of that idea, and this film in particular gets it. Striking cinematography from DP Albert Banzon bathes frames in darkness, creating an atmosphere of disorientation; it's been attempted before with films like Khavn's Three Days of Darkness (2007) but those films were not as successful, and the technology just wasn't there. The sound design is equally impeccable; Dayao's films and his other works (such as the recent streaming series The Tapes, which he wrote) all possess a solid sonic footing, relying less on jump scares and more on creating an atmosphere of dread. This movie is tense, suffocating, and it hardly lets up.

But what is perhaps most terrifying about Midnight in a Perfect World is that we don't have to look very far to see ourselves, reflected: this film was, in my best recollection, filmed late last year, but with its release in late 2020 I would not be surprised if you told me it was filmed last week. For only a few months ago, in a place that the higher-ups called 'safe,' the streets were empty, with parts of the city bathed in darkness. During the height of a pandemic, sirens blared in Manila at night, with warnings telling people not to come out or face the consequences. And here, too, even in a world as imperfect as ours, from back then and even until now, people vanish without a trace.