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Ligalig
English Translation: Anxiety
Year of Release: 2006
Director: Cesar Montano
Screenwriters: Cesar Montano & Willy Laconsay
(From a story by Cesar Montano)
Producer: CM Films
Cast: Cesar Montano, Sunshine Cruz, Johnny Delgado, Celia Rodriguez, John Regala, Katya Santos, Bayani Agbayani, Alvin Anson, Rommel Montano, Gwen Garci, Kalila Aguilos, Rebecca Lusterio, Manny Calayan, Jun Robles Lana, Jeri Lopez, Ashley Ott, Pia Cristobal, Christian Angelo Montano, Andrew Milallos
A serial killer, whom we learn later is named Damian, stalks couples in motel rooms and kills them after they have sex. The police put tabs on his whereabouts and assign an officer to track and arrest him. Junior, the son of a police officer, wishes to get serious with his girlfriend Trixie, so he assents when she says he has to meet her strict mother. She takes along her friend Toti but while she sleeps in the car, Toti feels up Junior’s leg as he drives. Trixie’s mother disapproves of her relationship, saying she has no future with a mere driver. Meanwhile Damian has followed them to Trixie’s rural hometown and makes plans to annihilate anyone he finds in Trixie’s household.
The host of complaints that greeted Ligalig, centered on its resemblance to Alexandre Aja’s Haute tension (High Tension, 2003), a sample of the New French Extremity, are redolent of the outcries that account for some of Danny L. Zialcita’s career decisions. It’s not the first time that a local product outdid the (admittedly inferior) foreign source from which it derived its story ideas, but the local critical short-mindedness tends to dwell on announcing the resemblance, declaring it an anomaly just for that reason, and abandoning the more difficult challenge of evaluation. Cesar Montano may have also been persistent in his pursuit of prestige and political posts, but then that should make his decision to select offbeat substance commendable, a return to his roots in detrital material, with the extensive use of then-new solid-state technology and non-linear postproduction—technical details that account for how the film manages to look and sound not so much different as updated. The final revelation, familiar to know-it-all viewers of the source film, nevertheless manages to work out within the terms of Ligalig, if only because of its more careful attention to causation and motivation.
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