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Excerpt:
Erik Matti is a talented and commercially successful filmmaker, but coherent storytelling isn't exactly his strong suit. He likes style, lots of it, slathered heavily over flimsy characters and nonsensical plots, filling up the space usually reserved for a film's themes and ideas. He likes to borrow, magpie-like, images, moods and colors from a wide range of filmmakers--Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Wong Kar Wai, San Miguel Beer commercials--tossing them in without rhyme or reason, to ferment in his celluloid chamber-pots. It would be nice to think he's aware of how hilariously his films play onscreen, but no; he's been heard to declare with the utmost solemnity about this or that oeuvre that he's consciously tried to emulate the works of a master like Ishmael Bernal, only to say "fuck it, I'm going to do things my way." Which he does, with inimitable results.
When he's working from someone else's screenplay, however, he's a different creature entirely. Dwight Gaston's screenplay for Pa Siyam (rough translation "Nine Days"--this refers to the traditional period of mourning after the deceased has been buried) is refreshingly low key: a family gathers together at their ancestral mansion to mourn the death of their mother, and a series of eerie events occur around them. This time there are no dead bodies in trunks, no suitcases full of cash, no nursing uniforms stained with rancid spaghetti sauce (don't ask): Matti is forced to put away his CGI toys, his whirligig camera and strobe-like editing tricks to tell the relatively straightforward story of a family frightened to within an inch of their lives.
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