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Midnight in a Perfect World
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2020
Director & Screenwriter: Dodo Dayao
From a story by Dodo Dayao & Carljoe Javier
Producers: Globe Studios & Epicmedia Productions
Cast: Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Glaiza de Castro, Anthony Falcon, Dino Pastrano, Bing Pimentel, Soliman Cruz, Dolly de Leon, Charles Aaron Salazar, Brian Sy, Aljhon Agnila, Nate Agustin, Rolly Catchuela, Elmar Flores, Timmy Harn, Patti Lapus, Joey Pinera, Jerico Ramota, Veronica Reyes, Jeriko Tan, Hank Valentine
In an unspecified future that still resembles the present, when the country has attained a level of developmental sanguinity, four friends decide to venture outdoors despite the possibility of a localized midnight blackout and their awareness that a mutual acquaintance has disappeared. They go to a club to score a new kind of powerful hallucinogenic drug but after their seller is killed, they leave the place. A power outage causes them to panic and they run along with a crowd of strangers fleeing from a death squad. One of them, Tonichi, knows of a safehouse where they could hide; but when they arrive, they realize he’s no longer with them. His panicked phone calls make them realize he’s lost. As they attempt to figure out their hiding place, they meet Alma, an older lady who says she’d already been to two other safehouses. They plan to go outdoors to save Tonichi but then Glenn gets left behind. Mimi and Jinka have to rely on each other for survival, not just from the death squad but also from a monster that lurks in the darkness.
Midnight in a Perfect World embodies the exception that proves the rule: that independent cinema should not necessarily be valorized just for existing, or else it raises the vexed predicament of dismissing a mainstream that had proved capable of containing great work in the past. It sets up the challenge of working in sci fi-horror, a generic hybrid routinely associated with developed economies because of its technological assumptions. What an adequately exposed practitioner like Dodo Dayao has figured out from existing samples provides the key for his audacious approach: that, on a certain level, the social impact of late capital does not differ much from one culture or period to another. The spaces, services, and law-enforcement policies for underclass citizens will be recognizable to anyone whose political sensibilities are sufficiently rooted in the here and now. From this point moving forward, the apparent limits of indigent production get transformed into useful resources, with darkness, squalor, inhospitable outdoors and constrictive indoors, and barely adequate hardware serving to intensify the atmospherics of fear. The attentive readings of an age-grouped collection of responsive performers draw us into a series of geographical and narrative culs-de-sac, while the seemingly unrelated prelude initiates the slasher structure that more or less gets observed along the way; the standard global-indie earnest demonization of lumpen characters that marred his debut feature has also apparently decamped for now. Once we realize that the confusion—of the characters and therefrom the audience—becomes an essential component of the presentation’s promise of pleasure, we’re well on our way.
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