MANILA – Dark. This is one adjective that would best describe the film “Kinatay (The Execution of P),” which won its maker the Palm d’Or best director award at the recently concluded prestigious 62nd Cannes Film Festival.

Not only the scenes were shot at nighttime, the tone of the film is also depressing and sad.

The beginning, almost one-fourth of the movie, seems to suggest happy and high moments, so the atmosphere is bright and sunny. The outdoor and even the indoor shots are light and clear. It goes with the jovial mood of a bustling metropolis and the wedding of a rookie cop (Coco Martin) and a simple, submissive housewife (Mercedes Cabral).

The rest is an interplay of light and shadow, the murkiest tint that could only paint a gloomy picture of evil. Some of the characters are mostly personification of the darkest and most unscrupulous thugs of the earth.

The hell begins after a young civilian go-between (Jhong Hilario) convinces the intern criminologist to take part in the abduction and murder of a drug dealer-prostitute and swindler played by Maria Isabel Lopez.

The swindler knows too much about an illegal group so she has to be neutralized.  The group is comprised a brutal syndicate gangster (Lauren Novero), a ruthless military sergeant (John Regala), a wishy-washy captain (Julio Diaz) and an invincible but invisible crime lord.

From the time of the abduction to the victim being hogtied, strangled, to her forcibly thrust to an abandoned house to the dismemberment of her body, the film is shadowy and grim.

To zero in on the moral dilemma, the newly married young police student is faced with these questions:  What shall he do? Run amuck these entire beasts of gun-toting men in authority, slip through the night and report them? Or participate, act as accessory to the crime and preserve the wholeness of his newly formed family?

“Kinatay” is a morality play in contradiction. We see the religious symbols of a Christian nation but the moral fibers, being sewn by its accompanying social and political institutions, are brittle and weak.     

Do we see a Lino Brocka-ish strain here when its director, Brillante Mendoza, admits the lead persona in the film is just a victim of a vicious society?

It was Brocka who professed the philosophy that his characters were mostly victims of circumstances and of repression during his early days of filmmaking. But he had transcended this as he went along doing mushy melodramas, political and otherwise, when his characters would rise up if suppressed for a long time.   

Contrary to some views, “Kinatay” has a narrative to follow despite its “real time” approach. It has a solid and fluid storytelling flow.

The actors, unsurprisingly, are all very good given the spontaneous dictates of the script.