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Holy Emy – AFI Fest 2021

Emy and her older sister Teresa live alone in Pireaus, the port City within greater Athens, after their mother is forced to return to the Philippines. They survive by avoiding the locals, attending church, and working at the local fish market. However, as their jobs fall through and Teresa grows more heavily pregnant, Emy seeks out Mrs. Christina to put her magical abilities to work. However, in coming out of hiding, Emy risks exposing her talents to the wrong people.

In Holy Emy, Emy and Teresa barely look old enough to care for themselves. They both look like teenagers but neither are in school – Teresa works at the local fish market, whilst Emy avoids most human contact now that her Mum has returned to the Philippines. It’s not clear why Emy didn’t return with her Mum. Perhaps her Mum thought she had enough support in Piraeus to stay whilst she returned home. She has her older sister, a neighbor that looks out for her (often condescendingly), and the support of the Filipino community at the local church.

The Filipino community is ‘othered’ in Holy Emy. All the Filipino characters are either overly devoted to Catholicism or have ancient powers which mimic Catholic Saints (hence the title). They’re also fetishized by the white characters in the movie. Teresa’s boyfriend keeps pointing out her Asian features when they’re making out, making it seem like he’s only into her because she looks exotic, whilst Mrs. Christina uses Emy, her mother, and other Filipinos for their magical abilities to heal people. There isn’t a reason why just the Filipinos have these old-world powers, which makes them appear even more exotic to the white characters. These defining characteristics fetishize the Filipinos in Holy Emy build up their ‘otherness’ vs. the white Greeks and Greek society.

Emy’s character in particular feels problematic. Her character, even more so than the rest of the Filipino community in this film, is made to seem unusual. She hardly speaks throughout the movie and is often pictured giving people creepy horror-film stares. Without a voice, she’s defined by her magical abilities: her ability to cry blood, heal, and control people through her touch and thoughts. Her silence and unusual abilities turn her into an old-world exotic fetish. Her character is just used as a tool to shock the audience and demonstrate her otherness. She, like the Filipino community in Holy Emy, are made to appear from another world – their magical powers and religious fervor don’t fit within modern Greek society. They’re fetishized for the sake of the quirkiness of this art-house body-horror.

Head to our AFI Fest 2021 Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2021.

Deleter (Philippines) – Social Media Musings Fail to Muster Maliciousness

By Sebastian Torrelio

Mikhail Red is at this point a public figure in the scope of Filipino cinema against the world. His latest, Deleter—sub-technological mystery horror and 2022 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture-winner—follows no tighter premise than the act of a haunted house’s outreach transformed into an office building’s Wi-Fi signal. Lyra (Nadine Lustre) works an outsourced job as a content moderator for a Facebook-esque website, constantly spending her few remaining sane hours wide-eyed against a computer screen, either passing or deleting through the gore, obscenities and disturbed cell phone clips that everyday citizens pick up, for innocent or malicious intention in equal.

Their task is to “handle data … not people,” as Lyra explains away for her friend Aileen (Louise delos Reyes), the only character of concrete stakes in the film. It makes sense – drag a role into the dark mentally, and the steps to embed them in darkness physically become smaller in turn.

The first act of Red’s modern thriller doesn’t seem to entirely know what to do with Lyra’s occupation anyhow, letting the scanned-through Internet play on its own tempo almost too seamlessly with the randomness of delight the Internet actually triggers. Most of her job, pre-dramatics, plays from a third-person angle as confusing, if not unintentionally humorous.

Not that Lyra’s view of social media is self-seriousness taken astray, more so that Red’s frame seems consistently imperfect, a beck and call to keep the digital world’s barrier into our own stable & threatening, but without the camerawork to persistently keep a hypnotized audience on the cusp of realism. Unlike recent postmodern breakthroughs, namely Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to World’s Fair, Deleter finds no rooted connection through the wiring, a sustained vibe of unrevealed horrors cut off by doldrums of meaningless white-collar task-mastering.

When the film’s final act is settled on its tracks veering toward the goalposts, the threatening aura of Red’s attempted sophisticated edge has whittled down a blunt stub. The last 30 minutes of Deleter, a repercussion of traumatic happenings that have surrounded Lyra’s life in the days prior, scurries into an oblique darkness – characters floating around the office building’s hallways to the willingness of intermittent red security lighting, every shot performed for set-placing without allowing the actors any presence within their own space. If actors are not given the occupied space to connect, life cut short via aerial camera becomes errant, death then in turn whimsical.

Seen at Cinemark Carson and XD

Dead Sands – Zombies Destroying the Bahraini Middle Class

Dead Sands Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

In the wake of a viral outbreak throughout Bahrain, a group of middle class strangers try to team up to survive. Only problem is they don’t share much in common so working together doesn’t come naturally.

If you’re looking for a B-Movie zombie movie from the Arabian peninsula that focuses more on bickering vs. actual zombie smashing, this is the movie you’re looking for.

From: Bahrain, Asia
Watch: YouTube, IMDb
Next: Night of the Living Dead, Attack the Block, Rattle the Cage

Dead Sands – The Breakdown

Dead Sands‘ hits a bunch of the zombie movie notes in the opening to establish itself as a horror movie. It starts with a Doctor’s warning to the population on a radio broadcast which is largely ignored by the radio host (the prophecy of impending doom). This is followed by an everyday scene which turns into a zombie attack. A woman and man argue, the man disappears with his dog, the dog squeals (sign no.1), the woman calls out to her friend but receives no answer (sign no.2), before the friend (and later the man who she was arguing with) come back to zombify her. This is classic zombie horror movie 101 and sets the movie up for viewers already familiar with the genre in order to make fun of it.

However, whilst Dead Sands positions itself as a satirical comedy of the genre, it doesn’t fully deliver on its promise. There’s little which satirizes the genre apart from a character flip – the long haired, Rambo-looking hard man is a gentle hairdresser. Instead the film almost forgets that it is a zombie movie as the narrative centers on the arguing between the characters. There’s a lot of character development and very few zombies. The only benefit is that the bickering is where the humor comes from. It’s funny to see a group of people unable to get along for trivial reasons, even in such desperate circumstances.

Maybe the focus on their bickering is a metaphor for their zombie-like reality. They’re all youthful members of a Bahraini middle class stuck in a country that’s too small for them. Half of them spoiled kids that you’d imagine come from the international school systems (speaking English) expecting more to life, and the other half are striving to be on the same social level. They come together as they all attend one of the few social centers available to them. They’re not overly surprised or terrified by the zombies as their social lives are already dead. There aren’t many options in their home country (Bahrain is only larger than Singapore and the Maldives in Asia) and therefore the zombies aren’t much of a change.

It’s entertaining to hear the relentless arguing in a horror movie but if you’re looking for a typical zombie movie set in Bahrain you might be a bit disappointed by the lack of action. Make sure you go into this movie knowing it’s a B-Movie focused on the bickering instead of the action.

What to Watch Next

If you want to go to the root of all today’s zombie movies, watch George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Or if you want to watch more contemporary zombie horror movies featuring ordinary conversations try Attack the Block and Shaun of the Dead.

Or, if you’re just looking for more genre movies from the Arabian peninsula check out Rattle the Cage from the UAE.