Elemento kicks off its plot with some urination. While out on a school field trip in a forest in Bulacan, Lucas (Albert Silos) wanders away from his class to urinate. He comes back as something different. His mom Kara (Cristine Reyes), who has been raising Lucas alone ever since breaking up with his philandering father Milos (Jake Cuenca), doesn't immediately notice the changes in her son. But it becomes apparent that whatever has taken the place of her son has dark intentions. Kara must travel to the same forest, which just happens to have a connection to forgotten memories haunting her dreams.
This movie quickly falls apart in the details. It mainly moves the story forward by capitalizing on the idea that Kara is a bad mother. It establishes the baseline for her neglect early on: she is the kind of mother that might shoo away her son while making a sales pitch to some prospective clients. She loses sight of him in a restaurant, and is later shown ignoring him while on a phone call. When she isn’t neglecting her son, she’s being smothering. She’s calling him constantly on his cell phone while out on the field, even though she knows he’s not even allowed to have it.
The movie refuses to endear Kara to the audience. She’s made out to be a pretty awful person from minute one, and that doesn’t really change throughout the runtime. There are interesting things that can be done with an unsympathetic protagonist, but this film doesn’t do any of them. Her shortcomings as a person are used as a plot device, her inability to figure out that something has gone wrong with her child allowing the movie to stretch out a very limp middle portion. She doesn’t seem to notice that the behavior of her child has child, until the movie finds it convenient to allow her to have any sort of perception whatsoever.
This all leads up to a twist of sorts, one that doesn’t get enough buildup, and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. It lands with a thud, some barely introduced characters explaining everything in clunky bits of late exposition. And then the movie just ends, with none of the consequences of the twist really explored. The movie doesn’t get to the end of its story. It just terminates, leaving plots dangling, characters unresolved, and any investment of attention squandered.
It’s bizarre. It’s bad enough that it comes off as intentional, like a conscious bit of self-sabotage. It’s hard to imagine professional storytellers happy with delivering this kind of product on a mass scale. It’s hard to imagine the actors not thinking that the material wasn’t worthy of their time, or that their careers would be better off after performing this dreck. It would be pretty awful if the people involved in this film intended to make something this bad. But then again, the alternative might be worse.
Elemento is baffling at times. There are even portions of it that are clearly designed to be comedic, in spite of the fact that the stuff happening on screen is scary in theory. The director himself shows up in a bit role, playing an incompetent policeman called in after the family dog dies under mysterious circumstances. It’s a weird scene, the movie immediately deflating the tension of a violent act with a comedy routine. This couldn’t have been an accident. Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t make for very good cinema.
My Rating:
