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Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B
English Translation: The Vampire in Unit 23B
English Title: The Woman in Unit 23B
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Prime Cruz
Screenwriters: Jenilee Chuaunsu & Prime Cruz
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, The IdeaFirst Co., Indioboy Productions
Cast: Ryza Cenon, Martin del Rosario, Vangie Labalan, Cholo Barretto, Japo Parcero, Marcus Morales, Gabby Padilla, Dino Pastrano, Aldrico Padilla, Eric Kim, Jeffrey Hayd, Pjay Tayem, Harvie Tayem, John Pedraya, Victor Sanchez, Anjos Rome, Joel Lacap, Jerry Tolentino, Noel Blanco, Jason Conanan, Rosalie Pulitado, Glea Burban, Alain Morata, Nico Gomez, Maqui Farr, Nestor Abrogena Jr., Prime Cruz, Galileo Te, Jenilee Chuaunsu, Chad Angelic Cabigon, Adi Lopez, Angelo Estanol, Robert Ruiz, Erik Reynoso, Rhon Dival, Adrian del Mundo, Red Musni, Halman Lambrento, Nick de Leon, Marol Adelan Eugenio, Hope Eduarte, Ichi Sotto, Peter Matrinez
Newly moved to her new apartment, Jewel makes the acquaintance of Nico. She lives alone while he stays with his hotheaded grandmother. He finds Jewel strange for her appetite for meat, including the duck embryo in balut. Some killings occur in their neighborhood but are attributed to the police prosecution of drug users. Jewel hangs out in dance clubs where a man attempts to pick her up and flirt with her while driving her home. She finds Nico at an outdoor cafeteria and manages to draw him out regarding his ex-girlfriend, then confesses that she never had a relationship because of her evil nature, which Nico finds hard to believe. Later that evening, she experiences pain in her belly and rubs ointment, then returns to the club all dolled up. She finds the man who tried to seduce her and takes him to an isolated place. She dominates him during intercourse and bites through his guts as they climax. Another night, Nico gets drunk in a bar and beaten up by his ex-GF’s companions: Jewel rescues him but stops herself after she tastes the blood from his wounds. Jewel gets along with Nico’s grandmother, but when the latter dies, both of them find themselves increasingly isolated and cornered for different reasons.
Made during the first year of the first fascist presidency since the elder Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster, Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B directly references the extrajudicial killings that landed Rodrigo Duterte in the custody of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. None of the actual EJK victims were as badly mangled as the vampire’s victims in AMU23B, but their wholesale demonization by the regime and its apologists could have left them in similar conditions and the public would have hesitated to look more closely then, at least initially. The film’s premise also turned on the victims deserving their comeuppance as sexist bourgeois deplorables, and later as hapless victims sacrificed for the sake of feeding the title character. But at roughly midway, a community event allows the characters to disclose themselves, sometimes inadvertently: an outdoor costume party, where the manananggal dresses up as a B-movie winged vampire and ironically assumes the guise of what she carefully hides from everyone. After a declaration of their passion for each other, her beau espies her undertaking her modus operandi as well as its murderous consequence, and has to contend with his own conflicted response. AMU23B wisely desists from further pressing its national-scale irony, where the rural spaces that engendered the fictional manananggal also contrived the horrific war on drugs (inspired actually by right-wing US presidencies). The lovers who lose everything in the film still have each other; the country that acquired a few developmental paces at the expense of some of its most vulnerable citizens will be lucky to regain its soul..
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