August 10, 2023
Eric (Carlo Aquino) had not said a word since he was a child. He communicated by means of writing on a whiteboard which was hanging around his neck. One night, his mother Rosalinda (Dolly de Leon) called him to check on his Uncle Rogelio, who had been missing for a few days already. From the animation studio where they worked overtime, Eric and his co-worker and new friend Carlo (Gio Gahol) went to his uncle's last known address.
When we first see Eric, you immediately notice that he had no mouth, which coincided with his inability to speak (although we never see how he ingested food or water). After the events at his Uncle's house, Eric was revisited by a giant green alien which terrorized his nightmares as a child. With his every encounter with this alien, we would see Eric lose other organs from his body. Will he be able to beat this monster before he loses his whole self?
Writer-director Carl Joseph Papa astutely decided that this complex, multi-layered tale dealing with a triggering subject matter can best be told by way of an animated film. Like his previous triumph "Manang Biring" which won Best Picture in the CinemaOne Filmfest of 2015, Papa once again used rotoscopic animation style of having computer-generated images super-imposed on the actual actors acting out the scene, but this one is in full color realism.
Interspersed among the present day scenes were also animated scenes using a more childish style of artwork to tell the flashbacks of Eric's childhood. Instead of reducing the triggering effect, these moving kindergarten crayon drawings with that black doodle drawn to obscure the face of the bad person narrated by a child's voice made these events look and even feel more traumatic than they inherently were. This felt more mature than its R13 rating.
Despite being overlain by animated computer graphics, we still see and feel the acting prowess of tried-and-true actors Carlo Aquino (a truly internalized acting performance), Dolly de Leon (for sweet maternal interaction in Ilocano language) and Gio Gahol (for a supportive BL angle) shining through. All three deserve acting nominations to recognize the challenge and difficulty of acting with a greenscreen in the manner they did. 8/10.
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