I'll have to admit, it took a while for me to warm up to Ryan Machado's Raging. The film can be rather obscure, its long takes inviting the audience to glean meaning and emotion from its central character Eli (Elijah Canlas, arguably at the peak of his abilities here). You wonder at first what the source of his turmoil is, with Machado sprinkling little bits of it in some scenes but not outright revealing the details of the source of that turmoil.
Comparisons have been made between this film and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist, and the parallels are there: as much as nature's rules are embodied in the central character of Hamaguchi's film, the systematic destruction of Romblon mountainside forests is tied to Eli's physical and emotional defilement.
My initial reaction to the film was wondering why the film felt so restrained, so hesitant to show Eli's interiority, why even as it slowly zooms into him, we don't see that rage outright. But I eventually realized, in the context of such a taboo subject as Eli experienced, something that feels unimaginable to society at large, the restraint is exactly the point. The language of people (and lands) with no one to speak for them is silence itself.
Raging's finale hews from the tropes of ablution as a way of cleansing sin, of nature serving as a purifying force. Its not an easy film to parse, but it is rewarding when you peel its layers back.
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