‘DELETER’ is the most blessed entry in the Metro Filmfest.
It won so many awards including best pic and is now the topgrosser at the box office, so maybe they wouldn't mind a dissenting opinion.
The movie belongs to that type of horror flick with a story that has been overused: the ‘naghihiganting multo’ who wants justice and vengeance for what some nasty folks did to him or her.
Director Mikhail Red’s last horror film, “Eerie”, is also about a grieving ghost in an all-girl school who’s out for revenge.
The ghosts in “Eerie” and “Deleter” both committed suicide.
Writer-director Joey Reyes has also used that trope in his past spooky films like “Malikmata” (MMFF 2003), “Spirit of the Glass” (MMFF 2004) and “Dilim” (2014).
“Deleter” is set in the little known world of content moderators or deleters who make sure that what comes out of the internet is more acceptable, so they delete offensive and questionable videos.
In other words, they act as censors doing digital cleaning.
Nadine Lustre as Lyra is a deleter. She looks so calm and serene that even her co-workers are wondering how she is not fazed by the kind of stressful work that they do.
What they don’t know is that she has serious daddy issues, delved into by the film in a cursory manner.
This is why she keeps to herself and generally avoids the company of other people.
Lyra’s life becomes complicated when another deleter, Aileen (Louise de los Reyes), has a breakdown and jumps to her death from the rooftop of their office building. It is so easy to predict where the story will go from here.
Lyra and Aileen have a nefarious boss, Simon (Jeffrey Hidalgo), who gives them suspicious looking pills.
There are no other characters who can be potential suspects, so it’s easy to conclude in this weakly written whodunit that the fiendish boss has something to do with the death of Aileen.
You would be such a dumb and moronic viewer if you wouldn’t be able to deduce this right away.
Like what we’ve written before so many times, this kind of horror flick is quite weak because our tendency as viewers is to side with the ghost. An injustice has been done to her, so may karapatan siyang maghiganti.
And she’s a high tech ghost, as she gets to liberally use video clips and the internet to scare Lyra.
In “Deleter”, it’s easy to understand why the “multo” wants to kill her evil boss and the security guard who the boss asked to delete all the video files concerning her death.
At first, we side with Lyra and we can’t comprehend why the “multo” is also after her. But everything will be explained later as to why she deserves to be punished too.
The movie is manipulatively designed to scare the viewers.
First is the very dark surroundings. The hallways and the very office itself is so darkly lit, as if they are being extra parsimonious about electricity and their is an order from their higher ups to scrimp on using lights.
In a scene where Lyra is being terrorized, someone from the audience quipped: “E, buksan mo kasi ang ilaw!”
We know this is utilized to establish a creepy atmosphere, but we’re more amazed by Chito Rono’s horror flicks that happen in broad daylight but still very frightening, like “Feng Shui”, the best local horror film that is definitely a classic in giving viewers a good scare.
The pacing is also very slow and lacks the jump scares of more effective horror flicks that fright movie aficionados have come to expect.
If you want to watch horror flicks that are more effective in using the same tropes, we recommend Wes Craven’s “Pulse” (based on a Japanese film and is so successful it had two sequels) and British films “Censor” (about a film censor who thinks a horror film has something to do with her sister’s disappearance) and “Host” (about an online seance that goes wrong).
If anything, the most notable thing “Deleter” did is to bring to public attention the sad plight of deleters who are not that well compensated for their very distressing jobs that merit more benefits for their psychological well being.