Uninvited

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Billionaire Guilly Vega (Aga Muhlach) throws himself a party in his massive mansion to celebrate not just his 55th year on Earth, but also to gloat at fate for outliving his father and grandfather, both of whom died young. His daughter Nicole (Nadine Lustre) hates him with a passion and relies on her boyfriend and their drug use to compensate for her unhappy childhood. Her mother Katrina (Mylene Dizon) differentiates herself from her husband’s crowd, funneling the dirty family money to charitable foundations she herself has organized. An unexpected guest arrives in the person of Eva Candelaria, who is actually Lilia Capistrano (Vilma Santos) pretending to be a socialite, supposedly one of the generous donors of Katrina’s foundation. Armed with nothing more than a plan, Lilia is out for revenge, because all the men responsible for her daughter’s death are attending that night, including the host himself. Will she succeed?

I already asked this question last year and I am going to ask it again. What are the people at Mentorque smoking and where are all these unhinged storyline ideas coming from? How did they convince Vilma Santos at age 71 to accept a role that I can only describe as a gender-reversed Liam Neeson in his Taken era inspired character, but with more glitz and less action? It’s wild but I love it and I am here for it! This production company is giving A24, to be honest. I hope they never run out of crazy ideas and release more films even outside of the MMFF. We need more out-of-the-box projects like this in lieu of the usual festival staples.

Santos’ role here is more nuanced and challenging than the one for which she won her fifth MMFF Best Actress award last year. While upping the level of suspension of disbelief is such a big ask, given how the premise is that of an elderly woman managing to go an a killing spree undetected at a party, I believe they still grounded it on a more believable backstory, showing the character’s road to vengeance. She didn’t really go all Uma Thurman in Kill Bill on all of them, that would’ve been ridiculous. Perhaps we just have to believe that she is one extremely lucky person to end up where she did as the credits rolled.

Much of the criticism against Muhlach has been the repetitive matinee idol roles he keeps on getting despite being in his mid-fifties, with leading ladies half his age. He rarely plays against type, but it is when he does that he shines the brightest. Remember Nuuk in 2019 or Sa Aking Mga Kamay in 1996? It’s strange that he never really explored all that wasted potential when he was younger, but it is never too late to start. As a billionaire psychopath who always gets away with his crimes, what lets Guilly down as a character is not the portrayal but the lack of humanizing backstory, which helps make him more terrifying but a bit caricaturish.

Lustre also delivers strong support but Nicole suffers the same fate as her father when it comes to characterization. She is rebelling because of a traumatic childhood, and because of this we already kind of know what she will do in the end. Lustre embodies the character and makes her stand out. When she is in the scene, you look and you listen. That’s screen presence right there. The real supporting actress revelation here, though, is newbie Gabby Padilla whose portrayal of her character as the murdered daughter is just so haunting and compelling despite the relatively shorter screen time.

Overall, Uninvited is really not that original in terms of storyline, but a material like this rarely gets greenlit in a local film industry saturated with formulaic rom-coms and physical comedies. You usually see films like this in the indie scene where they can be freely experimented upon but with a budget that does not help much. It’s good that there is a production company willing to take the risk to bring such narratives into the mainstream. It will be a tough battle to change the taste of the general viewing public, but it has to start somewhere. I hope Mentorque doesn’t go bankrupt. I am a new fan.