Tragic Theater takes its premise from real life tragedy. Namely, the death of workers during the construction of the Manila Film Center. The film kicks off with a dramatization of the event, before jumping to 1999. Annie (Andi Eigenmann) works for the Department of Tourism. She is in charge of a project to rehabilitate the Film Center. She enlists the help of her old friend Father Nilo (John Estrada), who leads up a team of spirit communicators. They go inside and make contact with the ghosts haunting the facility, hoping they can convince them to leave.
Of course, it isn't that simple. The ghosts have no intention of leaving, and there also appears to be something more dangerous in there with them. It's an intriguing premise, but the film really fumbles the execution. It fails to make the characters worth caring about, and struggles to balance the demands of its multi-headed narrative. Tragic Theater manages to string together some interesting images, but it is unable to weave these images into a tapestry of coherent narrative.
The film loses sympathy pretty early on, as it establishes that while the main character believes in the spirits and recognizes their danger, she will willfully ignore all the warnings of the experts in the field. And so when she is eventually met with danger, it's difficult to feel anything for her. She has been reminded more than once about the rules of the séance, but she stupidly breaks them anyway. From then on, it's a real struggle to care about anything that she's doing.
Not that the story provides her with much to do. The film really has trouble establishing the actual danger of the situation. It keeps the motivations of its main threat really vague, and it isn't entirely clear what peril the characters are actually facing. The spirits mostly limit themselves to making threats, but never really do much to back them up. And again, the movie keeps making it clear that the characters are safe as long as they follow some very simple rules. It is only Annie that’s really supposed to be facing any real danger, and her journey is kept to the metaphysical realm. While that provides plenty of intriguing possibilities, the movie mostly seems to use this conceit as a means of bending spatial logic.
There’s a fairly long sequence, for example, where Annie is faced with four doors. She opens one and leaves it ajar. She goes to open another door, and the one she left ajar suddenly closes. This happens three more times. This scene is typical of this movie. It’s kind of a nice shot, but it doesn’t really move the story forward. There’s no new information being revealed. We learn nothing about the character, other than the fact that she seems incapable of learning, as she’s startled every time this happens. Andi Eigenmann seems to have plenty of enthusiasm for the role, but it is a thankless task. She is playing one of the worst horror heroines of all time.
Tragic Theater feels like it was cobbled together from several different scripts. Late in the game, in a crucial moment in the film, there is a sudden lengthy flashback that focuses on an earlier exploit of the bishop played by Christopher de Leon, who up to this point was barely in the movie. The film interrupts its own story, taking the audience out of the present in order to flesh out the backstory of a tertiary character. The film goes on like this, never really knowing where to place its focus, and struggling to make it feel like the characters are in any imminent danger.
My Rating:
