Kisapmata (In the Blink of an Eye)
Director: Mike de Leon
Year: 1981
Country: Philippines
By 1981, the year of his fourth feature Kisapmata, Filipino filmmaker Mike de Leon had already mastered the art of bypassing Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law censorship through various means of smuggling in dissident meanings. His debut Itim (1976) masked an allegory of erasure of the past and patriarchal violence through the guise of a gothic ghost story. In the more commercially pitched Moments of a Stolen Dream (1977), he embedded the disillusionment of life under dictatorship within a bittersweet rom-com affair between an aimless student and a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. And by 1980, his generic palette reached fever pitch with the gloriously insane Will Your Heart Beat Faster?, an unhinged musical-comedy-action weaving together Japanese and Chinese crime syndicates, contraband pop cassettes, and disco-dancing nuns into an international plot to disguise drugs as communion wafers and mass-brainwash the Filipino populace — a scathing if outrageous metaphor for the combined influence of neocolonial influence, religion, and consumer culture. Beneath their stylistic diversity, each film somehow distilled the same predicament of a society forced to smile while slowly suffocating.
While Kisapmata returns to the sombre psychological tone of Itim, it still marked a striking new turn in Mike de Leon’s filmography. A domestic thriller staring unflinchingly into the eyes of family tyranny, it shows that, in the Philippines of 1981, the terror of the nation could already be found inside the walls of one’s own home. Mila (Charo Santos), a young female bank employee, is in a secret, premarital relationship with her colleague Noel (Jay Ilagan), a deep taboo in the staunchly Catholic nation of the Philippines where even divorce remains illegal. After the chillingly scored opening credits sweep over an exterior shot of the family home at night, the film’s first scene (in which Mila discloses her secret to her parents) begins to lay bare the dysfunctional family dynamics.
Fearful and apprehensive (Image 1), Mila nervously attempts to pull her father’s attention away from his beer long enough to say: “I want to get married…” The room is tense and airless, the only sound coming from the mother’s sewing machine in the background (how voiceless the mother remains through this scene also speaks volumes about the family hierarchy), a mechanical whir which pointedly pauses at every emotional climax of Mila’s confession. When she finally utters, “I am pregnant” and the mother once again stops to create a jarring sonic counter-point, we brace ourselves for an explosion from this seeming patriarchal autocrat.
But Dadong (a pitch-perfect performance from Vic Silayan), an ex-police inspector, proves more chilling than a burst of anger. Instead, he dons an affable mask of grinning machismo, hearty beer-guzzling, and throaty cackle (Image 2) that belie the confidence of unchecked authority beneath. Obliged to give his blessing to the marriage (Mila being already pregnant, and abortion unthinkable), his performative paternal goodwill only make his calculated suffocation of the lives of his daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law all the more nightmarish. Over the course of a few weeks, signalled by regular on-screen titles charting the days moving across one fateful November and December, Kisapmata reveals a genuinely frightening portrait of abusive power tightening like a vice.
A wider national allegory seems irresistible here. The film’s representation of violence, incest, and psychic abuse offer themselves as a mirror image of the terror of the Marcos regime. Remarkable then that de Leon not only made the film under martial law but also got it invited to screen at the Cannes film festival — precisely when Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were trying to launder the global image of the Philippines through beauty-pageant diplomacy and cultural soft power. As effective as it is as a straight claustrophobic chiller, Kisapmata‘s multiple layers can only be appreciated by tracing this allegorical dimension, seeing Dadong as some distillation of Marcos himself, a ‘father of the nation’ ruling his household with charm, manipulation, and sadistic control masked as benevolent authority. A patriarch who insists he always knows best, who expects gratitude and devotion in exchange for the security he claims to provide, and punishes any deviation from filial loyalty.
Like Dadong, Marcos cloaked megalomaniac domination under the guise of care and protection. Declaring martial law in 1972 supposedly to protect the nation (in fact, to protect his own power), he swiftly imposed curfews, silenced media outlets, imprisoned dissenters, and even banned Filipino citizens from overseas travel. The populace, the ‘children of the nation’, were locked inside the vast ‘house’ of the nation, with the patriarch monitoring every exit. In Kisapmata, the household is a microcosm of this national enclosure. As in Itim, de Leon makes the house a character in its own right: a two-storey structure whose upper floor operates as Dadong’s surveillance perch (Image 3), an inescapable panopticon prison whose interiors, crowded with old photos, hunting trophies, religious icons, and an array of clocks and calendars ticking toward the film’s inexorable countdown, exude not homely warmth but stultifying dread. Even the mother, both complicit abuser and victim, must feign illness upstairs to keep Mila by her bedside instead of with Noel. We sense the control Dadong has over every corner of his ‘fortress’, even personally tending to the garden and his beloved pigs. Every aspect of the house undercuts this impression, down to the front gate wrapped in barbed wire which repeatedly appears in the mise-en-scene as an ominous crown of thorns around the trapped young couple (Images 4 and 5).
Beyond the suffocating physical geography of the household, Kisapmata is also powerful in showing two other forces keeping Mila and Noel trapped in the web spun by this outwardly jovial and approving father: firstly, his psychological hold through emotional blackmail and guilt, and secondly his position of power as an ex-policeman within a network of corrupt cops, in a context where police corruption is rife.
Firstly, Kisapmata‘s clearest window into the psychic damage suffered by Mila comes through the diary-writing scenes and nightmare sequences. The moments of rare privacy with her diary alone in her room (Image 6), her only limited space of selfhood, reveal her thoughts through voiceover, thoughts she could not speak aloud to anyone, not even Noel, thus making her diary like a confession booth. But tapping into the resentment and fears she expresses opens up many other wounds. In one such scene, suddenly the colour drains into monochrome and Mila leaves her room, silently descending like a zombified sleepwalker down the staircase where water pours relentlessly behind her (Image 7), like a flood of repressed memories she cannot contain. The soundtrack filled with eerie electronic tones, the house uncannily mutates into a church and we understand the film has slipped into Mila’s dream. Kisapmata‘s understanding of her subconscious, of her internal turmoil torn between Catholic guilt weaponised by her mother (who constantly begs Mila not to break her father’s heart) and unspoken rage for the man who should love and protect her but abuses her, makes the film all the more believable and hard-hitting.
Secondly, Dadong’s authority extends beyond the walls of his house. As an ex-cop who still has many connections, Dadong maintains the loyalty of the police, something which kills any hope of Mila and Noel seeking help from the authorities. Dadong’s dual status as father and policeman collapse into a single principle whereby the figure entrusted with protection becomes the agent of corruption and violence, something also characteristic of the Marcos regime as a whole. And just as Dadong’s cop friends boast of extorting money, so under Marcos a network of cronies enriched themselves through the plunder of state funds, decimating the nation’s treasury even as the public was told they were being safeguarded.
Finally, Kisapmata‘s tragic ending would also be prescient of the violence that soon followed in real life. In 1983, Marcos’ main political rival Benigno Aquino Jr. was gunned down outside Manila airport upon courageously returning from exile, a state-linked political assassination that finally shattered all illusions and exposed the full rot of the dictatorship. Aquino’s murder galvanised opposition movements across the nation, bringing together a broad church of leftists, Catholics, disillusioned technocrats, reform-seeking military factions, as well as millions of ordinary citizens, which ultimately led to Marcos’ downfall in 1986 snap elections, won by Aquino’s widow. Kisapmata is unforgettable as a domestic horror, but it is also unmistakable in how lucidly it captures the historical arc of an entire bloody era, one which — to the chagrin of the late, great Mike de Leon — has continued to repeat itself.
Kisapmata can be viewed (with English subs) over at https://rarefilmm.com/2021/02/kisapmata-1981/
References/Further reading:
Mike de Leon’s Last Look Back (2022), by Mike de Leon.
A New History of Southeast Asia (2010), by M.C. Ricklefs, Bruce Lockhart, Albert Lau, Portia Reyes and Maithrii Aung-Thwin.
Cinescope 