‘Talahib’ REVIEW: A barren wasteland with no value
‘Talahib’ REVIEW: A barren wasteland with no value
Joem Bascon with a vengeful entity behind him in Talahib | Still taken from the Official Trailer
This review contains spoilers for Talahib.
I'm going to be completely honest here: I honestly don't know what else to write about Talahib when nothing happened in those eighty minutes (that feel like hours) that’s actually worth talking about.
Its worthlessness isn’t because the film isn't trying. Director Alvin Yapan attempts to integrate the issue of land ownership with the horror premise of a vengeful entity haunting his own place of death and those families who wronged him. There is also an attempt to paint a spooky and claustrophobic atmosphere by turning on the fog machines in the sets and keeping the camera close and center while the characters traverse the tall grass as the entity stalks them.
But the thing is, the whole film never transcends to anything but a couple of loglines haphazardly generated from a screenwriting workshop. At the start of the film, we see an attempted rape being thwarted by the entity who murdered both the rapist and the victim by slitting their throats.
And then after a showy title card, that's completely out of place, we immediately get to a scene with the two leading police officers investigating the murders in the opening scene. Not before long, we get another extended chase sequence back in the tall grass between the expendable heroes and the invincible villain that feels like it's plucked out rotten from the slasher film gardens.
There is no escalation of tension; no proper introduction to the characters; no drama. We're just thrown to the action barely five minutes in. We already have a handful of slit throats and bodies being pulled to oblivion before the film hits its halftime, and there’s still nothing to latch onto.
Eventually, the origins of the vengeful entity are revealed with some basic character motivations: he was a former serial killer before he was killed out of revenge by the parents of a group of teens that the two leading officers encountered while investigating the haunted grassy fields. This group of teens explained that the serial killer’s spirit is the one responsible for the killings, and that they’re there to find a way to vanquish him before more innocent people fall victim to his rage.
It seems like a decent premise overall, but Talahib feels like the end product of a rushed production and a skinny screenplay, because so much of it is poorly defined and underdeveloped that the answers that we get in its mysteries never matter anyway. Aside from the one-dimensional characters and the absence of decent scares, the attempts at social commentary about land ownership are lost in the multiple langit-lupa games between the malevolent spirit and the noisy, clueless victims who scream and run for dear life out of the killing fields.
In short, Talahib is a blade of grass in a barren wasteland; it’s there, it exists, but it has no value. And soon, it will all dry up in the sun and be forgotten.
‘Talahib’ premiered at Sinag Maynila at select cinemas from September 4 to 10.
