By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Felicity Kyle Napuli, Beauty Gonzalez and James Mavie Estrella
Written and directed by Kenneth Dagatan
Prime Video
Among other things, this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival has offered a strong showcase for Asian child actresses. Following Jaeden Paige Boadilla in RAGING GRACE (see review here) and the girls of Amanda Nell Eu’s TIGER STRIPES, Felicity Kyle Napuli excels as the young heroine of IN MY MOTHER’S SKIN, facing tribulations that no one her age–or any age–should have to suffer.
A Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival that’s headed for general release via Prime Video, IN MY MOTHER’S SKIN opens with a frankly grisly prologue before settling into folk-horror territory. The setting is the Philippines as WWII is coming to an end, and the occupying Japanese forces are committing horrible atrocities against Filipino babies–or so says young teenager Tala (Napuli) to her little brother Bayani (James Mavie Estrella). Their family lives in a large house in the isolated countryside, which their father Romualdo (Arnold Reyes) soon leaves on a mission that he says will help protect them. It’s bad timing, given that their mother Ligaya (Beauty Gonzalez) has fallen ill, and her sickness gets worse in Romualdo’s absence. While their housekeeper Amor (Angeli Bayani) clings to the hope for Catholicism to help them, Tala discovers another potential savior when she goes exploring the surrounding forest: a female entity billed as The Fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith).
Cutting a striking figure in resplendent robes and a headdress suggesting insect wings (to match the bugs that herald her appearance), the Fairy offers Tala a cure for her mother’s sickness. It’s a classic children’s-story scenario, and this Fairy tale becomes especially grim as Ligaya goes from sickly to monstrous, and Tala discovers the hard way that the Fairy’s promises to help her and her family are not to be trusted. It’s especially traumatic that their mother, who should be the one to comfort and protect them, becomes a source of danger to Tala and Bayani–but as it turns out, she’s not the only one.
IN MY MOTHER’S SKIN is rich in atmosphere from the beginning, as writer/director Kenneth Dagatan and cinematographer Russell Morton alternate between harshly sunlit days and (increasingly as the movie continues) deep dark nights. Dagatan also maintains an effective balance of supernatural threat and that posed by other people, the latter tied to a cache of stolen Japanese gold that Romualdo is suspected of having stashed somewhere in the house. And after a first hour of spooky suggestion and quiet chills punctuated by occasional bits of bloody business, the film becomes seriously uncompromising in its horrors, with genuinely shocking moments as Tala’s circumstances become truly harsh and unforgiving.
Through it all, Napuli is a revelation, grounding the film in Tala’s resolve to take care of her mother and brother while also conveying her vulnerability, in ways the prevent the girl’s suffering from seeming exploitative. (When the going gets especially grueling, Tala even gets a sort of shivery hero moment that had the Fantasia audience applauding.) All the performances around her are equally attuned to maintaining a sense of naturalism and reality that both complements and augments the impact of the occult terrors and violence intruding on the characters’ world. Kudos are also due to others on the craft team: Benjamin Padero and Carlo Tabije, whose production design (with the latter also responsible for the costumes) helps create a fully enveloping world; composer SiNg Wu and audio designers Eddie Huang and Chen Yi Ling, who make the film sound as eerie as it looks; and June Goh, the lead artist behind the squeam-inducing makeup effects. The efforts of the entire team guarantee that IN MY MOTHER’S SKIN will definitely get under yours.
