Movie Review: Dementia - Beautifully Mounted But Provides No Solid Scares

“DEMENTIA” avoids MLT’s kind of bloody gore with its more quiet version of a ghost story. We really pray it makes lots of money for the sake of Ate Guy and Direk Perci Intalan, but sadly, when we watched it at Trinoma on the first day of its screening, there were only a handful of us moviegoers. The best thing about “Dementia” is the location, the beautiful islands of Batanes captured in all its glory by the superb cinematography. But this is not new since Batanes has been explored before in “Hihintayin Kita sa Langit”, and the Adolf Alix movies “Kadin” and “Batanes”. Often told with splendid production and technical values, but at a very leisurely pace that dwells so much on the gloomy, eerie atmosphere of the place, the movie has so much moody ‘boringga’ factor.

Horror films can be told in an unhurried pace without being tedious and lethargic. The best example for us is Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents”, an adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”, about a governess (beautifully played by Deborah Kerr) trying to save two haunted children. A psychological enigma, it takes its time in telling the ambiguous story as you can’t tell whether the story is really happening or it’s all just in the unbalanced mind of the governess, but the overall effect is cumulative, which doesn’t happen in “Dementia”. Like other scare flicks, “Dementia” merely resorts to its own share of cheap jump scares capitalizing on loud noise and jarring music.

Nora Aunor is Mara Fabre, an aging woman who is losing her memory so her relatives (Bing Loyzaga, husband Yul Servo and daughter Jasmine Curtis ) bring her to her old home in Batanes which she left 37 years ago. Bing and family are balikbayans from the States and we presume Mara lives by herself in Manila. This is unusual for Pinoys in the U.S. They would most probably just leave Mara in a nursing home where more expert caregivers can attend to her and won’t go to all the trouble of taking her back to Batanes.

At any rate, let’s give in to the film’s premise. Mara doesn’t recover her memories. Instead, she gets spooked and sees apparitions of a girl and a woman in a bridal gown. After a long setup, Mara’s diary is then discovered and it provides information about her back story. As a girl, she’s an ampon adopted by Nadine Samonte (in a guest role) to take care of her insane child who gets violent and who is hidden from the public. Even the caretaker (Lou Veloso) does not seem to know about her. (How they can hide this from a small community like the one they have in the island is hard to believe.) Mara becomes the loony’s primary caretaker until they both grow up (the young Mara is played by Althea Vega and the loony, by Chynna Ortaleza.)

Once the film tackles Mara’s past, it becomes messy and forgets all the other details supplied earlier while setting things up. Yul has a big dramatic scene where he confronts Mara for disparaging him before. But there’s no follow up on this and it’s just left hanging in the air. And when Yul is killed by his own daughter, the whole thing is simply ignored and not even mentioned again at all. Jasmine’s character doesn’t even show an iota of remorse as they were leaving the place.

How the crazy Chynna gets to kill Mara’s boyfriend is not shown. It’s just a mere plot device that you have to blindly accept. And there’s no investigation at all about his death. As a matter of fact, there are so many nebulous things in the story. For instance, what kind of life did Mara have after Chynna’s death and she left Batanes? We are left in the dark by the script about this.

Nora Aunor is not really given much to do as Mara. She has little dialogue and mainly banks on her eyes and facial expressions. We sometimes see her smiling like some retard. The film’s main fault is that we don’t get to be emotionally involved in Mara because she is reined in by the constraints of the role, which is underwritten. We don’t really get to care for her, so there’s not much dramatic tension. Ate Guy got a better role in “Hustisya”, which is uneven in its narrative flow, but allows her to come up with a more well rounded portrayal of her character, Biring. But her best performance so far this year is in the TV movie “When I Fall in Love” where she truly sizzles as Tirso Cruz III’s suffering but loyal wife.

In “Dementia”, she gets excellent support from Bing Loyzaga as her supportive niece and Jasmine Curtis Smith as the bored balikbayan teenager who gets possessed by the vindictive ghost. We don’t know why Perci Intalan chose a horror film to be his directorial debut. Sorry to say it provides no solid scares. There’s a fine horror film somewhere in “Dementia”, but it never succeeds in fully emerging out of the shadows due to the lack of a more polished story development.