Taut scripting weaves skein of telling details in Bernal’s chiller-thriller

AFTER viewing Joyce Bernal’s “Segunda Mano,” we tick off the production’s principal plus points: Appropriately creepy visuals and editing, some standout portrayals—and a script that manages to tie up its story’s many loose plot points into a thematically cogent and unified whole at film’s end. This is an unusual achievement for a local chiller-thriller, so let’s focus on this key aspect of the movie:

Most homegrown horror flicks introduce a lot of red herrings and other harum-scarum tactics to continually rattle viewers and scare the living daylights out of them—but, after the denouement, most of those freak-out ploys turn out to be patently incredible and inserted just to give moviegoers a momentary jolt.

Also, many horror films are disappointing, because viewers can anticipate how they will develop—so, when the finale plays itself out, it’s no surprise.

In “Segunda Mano,” however, many seemingly unrelated incidents later turn out to be part of an intricately woven skein of telling details—that ultimately reveal the full horrific dimensions of its genuinely shocking ending. Sorry, but we have to go on “spoiler” mode to illustrate this:

Back story

In the movie’s back story, female lead Kris Aquino’s kid sister died from drowning—but her mother, played by Helen Gamboa, still hoped against hope that she had survived and was given a good life by a surrogate family elsewhere.  —Well, it turns out that she was right!

Twenty years later, Kris’ long-lost sister, now played by Angelica Panganiban, was killed in a burst of mad, jealous frenzy by her psychologically warped husband (Dingdong Dantes)— and her ghost kept spooking Kris’ character, not to scare her but to warn her, because in the interim, Kris had become Dingdong’s fiancee!

This is all hindsight and after the fact, but the skein of “coincidences” holds up to closer scrutiny after the movie’s denouement is played out. Our compliments, therefore, to the movie’s director and writer for lending thematic cogency and revelatory focus to what would, in lesser hands, have been the usual welt and welter of cheap, chiller-thriller red herrings and clichés.

Flashbacks

The film also tries to weave a telling back story to explain Dingdong’s madness, but less effectively. In flashbacks, it shows how, as a child, Dingdong’s character was traumatized when he witnessed his father’s suicide after he caught his wife with another man.

This did “explain” why Dingdong ended up killing his spouse in a fit of murderous jealousy—but, it was too “corollary” a juxtaposition, and thus was too pat an explanation to have a genuinely surprising, revelatory and telling effect on viewers.

On the other hand, the Kris-Angelica angle was sometimes profoundly moving, because of the theme of a “long-dead” sister’s spirit refusing to rest until she had saved her clueless sibling from their “mutual” murderer.

Best of all, the fact that the “sister” angle was affirmed only at the very end of the film made it even more movingly revelatory and profoundly meaningful. Kudos all around.