Creeping, Gory Filipino Horror In My Mother’s Skin Will Chew You Up and Spit You Out
Warm, stuffy and slowly encroaching like the creeping threat of starvation, In My Mother’s Skin will worm its way under yours. Filipino filmmaker Kenneth Dagatan conjures a fantastical horror with the thematic interests of Guillermo del Toro and the brutality of Joko Anwar. In My Mother’s Skin blends a child’s chance encounter with a tricky fairy—elaborate and ornate in her insectile ensemble—with a World War II backdrop to craft a thoroughly haunting midnight thriller. Rich with subtext and warring cultural iconography, it’s got body horror, religious doubt and enough delicious flesh to leave gorehounds completely sated. Colorful and bold, it’s a beautifully scary affair.
Dagatan’s skills lie both in conventional horror sequence construction and the unique setting of a highly specific period stage. There will eventually be a possession-like incident, leading to a stalking force. Scares linger, scares jump. But none would be as impressive if they didn’t all take place in a once-lovely estate, now fading amid the lush greenery of its surroundings, under existential threats and ones all too human.
Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) lives with her mom (Beauty Gonzalez) and little brother (James Mavie Estrella) in a posh house, staffed by two servants, on the edge of the jungle. Her dad does, well, something that was once lucrative, and, seeing as the Philippines were smackdab in the middle of the Japanese and the Americans tearing the Pacific apart in 1945, that something was probably a little sketchy. That’s what a local Japanese collaborator thinks, and he’s convinced his Imperial pals that the family is hiding gold. When the dad hits the bricks for a bit to escape this heat, times get tough. Tala and her brother are running out of food. Her mom starts coughing up blood. What’s a girl to do?
As Dagatan painstakingly starts leafing through his morbid fairy tale, you see the problems coming on every tattered page. Tala, young and desperate and (just a little) cocky, never does. Like del Toro’s scheming supernatural creatures, an alluring force steps out of the shadows to provide. A fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), abuzz with promises and potential, sees Tala’s need and strikes. The resulting body horror—which gives Tala’s mom a much worse problem—is disgusting, as grim and gory a counter to the fairy’s glistening beauty as seeing a cloud of butterflies strip a corpse to the bone.
When the fairy arrives, any methodical pacing or languid humidity drops away. You’re moving fast, in a cold sweat, struck by the immediacy of the danger, heralded by a terrifying creature. It’s a wonder of DIY fabrics and light, translucent and with all the colors of the rainbow captured in their bubble-like shine. It’s also a wonder of performance, with Curtis-Smith’s brilliantly understated face framed in gold. All together, the monster merges into an intoxicating, terrifying, fucked-up cicada goddess. She embodies the kind of symbolic (or, in the very worst cases, literal) carrion-feeding that wartime inspires, riffing too on the traditional insect-using magic of the mambabarang. And she’s hungry.