EVIL GETS THE BETTER OF THE PROTAGONIST

Villa Estrella (Rico Ma Ilarde/Philippines/2009)

Swimming polls killing people because of retaliating spirits is actually an impossible idea even if you ask seasoned spirit questors. Pools may be haunted but for them to engulf unfortunate human beings is only a cinematic exaggeration. This in reality makes Villa Estrella a real fictional-horror film. By that, it means that you don’t have to worry about what is happening in the film to happen as well once you find yourself amazed over a swimming pool.  The film is made up of a typical ghost film plot and twisting it in ways where some is predictable others surprising and eventually end up in a way unconventional ending that though may cause unsatisfaction to normal audience, causes awe at least for me.

Ana (Shaina Magdayao) finds herself helpless against her ex-boyfriend, Alex (Jake Cuenca), with the permission of her dad Eddie (John Estrada) to e in a certain dilapidated resort called Villa Estrella that they have a plan to revive. Ana though having comfortable times with Mang Gustin (Ronnie Lazaro), Suzy (Rubi-Rubi), and Giselle (Maja Salvador/Eda Nolan), still can’t get easy with her ex-boyfriend’s manipulation, her father’s pressures, and the many weird things for her happening in the place: Jennifer (Celine Lim) talking to an invisible friend, Mang Gustin’s missing daughter, and her near death experience, almost drowning in the pool. Together with Dennis (Geoff Eigenmann) and Otap (Empoy Marquez), Ana makes an attempt to get out of the place but ends up staying the whole night after Otap can’t be seen anymore in addition to when she learns that her locket is no longer with her. The next day, Eddie and Dave (John Arcilla), fathers of both Ana and Alex respectively, arrive at Villa Estrella. Dennis, after searching friend Otap, learns about a certain Andrea buried under the swimming pool. Ana finds out that Giselle is not the Giselle she has known the day before but a ghost wanting to avenge her death. Ana learns that she is Andrea, the daughter of Mang Gustin. To her outmost surprise, Dave and her father, Dave, killed Andrea. Dave shots dead Dennis after knowing what he just discovered. Eddie is killed by Mang Gustin. Andrea tells Ana that she wants her body. After saying I can’t to what Andrea has just said, the latter vanished, and what appears to her at the neck of a statue towering the pool is her locket that her deceased mother gave her. In attempt to get the sentimental locket, the statue collapses, diving down the pool with Ana. After a year, Andrea has taken over Ana’s body without Mang Gustin and Alex knowing.

Villa Estrella is a little above average horror film. The screenplay is well thought of. The well-kept secrets and the horrifying process of their revelations are impressive. The swimming pool is a good metaphor of a buried secret that even after many years resurfaces terribly gruesome and thrilling. The twist that Maja is a spirit is not totally surprising especially with her unfathomable and stern looks. Living after The Sixth Sense has been released makes watching anything like this very easy to decipher. What is really unpredictable is her killers—the two fathers of the troubled Alex and Ana, where an early comment of Suzy about the two missing uncles of Alex said that men couldn’t last a night without women, which is what exactly Eddie and Dave did to Andrea. I love the fact many things in the film are well planted—Mang Gustin’s dead daughter, Suzy’s daughter, the locket, and even the kid ghost—Danica, though looking overrated with her shocking appearances without direct relationship to Andrea actually is a well planted element of the film for she diverts the audiences’ reading that Andrea is the real force of horror in the pool.

The film’s foxy handling of information is a good part of it. Maja Salvador’s acting is another one. Her acting is brilliant. In fact, the best I have seen from this young actress. Cabalistic enough to be suspicious, she creates a fountain of interest leading towards her. The scene where she is being drowned by John Estrada is the best part of the movie for her. she surely, as it shows, understands the word helpless—as it defines the scene explaining the mystery that impels everything. But what I really admire about the film is the surprising and unusual failure of the protagonists. Ana has three objectives: to stop Andrea's retribution, to get out of the shadows of her ex-boyfriend Alex, to be with Dennis, and even to get the found locket if you want to add, then make it four And she, completely achieved nothing, because aside from the very minimal, almost negligible efforts, all she did in the film is actually to walk-out, to run, and to escape. Andrea, the antagonist and supposedly the loser, wins the film. If we take a look at the people who died in the crucial night of Villa Estrella, we will see that Eddie and Dennis are both Ana's loved ones while those who survived, Mang Gustin, Alex, and Ana's body, are what Ana needs if she is to live in the person, in the life of, and in the body of Ana. This is an unusual ending, thoough not absolutely unusual for we see some similarities with Jun Lana's "Kulam" but this is something that you will not always see in Star Cinema.

The fortitude of Villa Estrella comes from its boldness (though not absolute) of rejecting a staple happily and  victoriously ended horror films.