Season of the Devil review – murderous Filipino opera of pain is a tough watch

The latest film from Norte, The End of History director Lav Diaz, takes us into the heart of darkness, but at four hours it’s a frustrating experience

There can hardly be a deeper, darker vale of tears at this year’s Berlin film festival than Season of the Devil, the stylised yet starkly austere, four-hour film in black and white from Filipino director Lav Diaz, about the brutal period of martial law imposed on his country by President Marcos in the 1970s. I have had mixed responses to Diaz’s films recently: I admired the grandeur and mystery of his “Russian adaptations”, that is, his The Woman Who Left (2016), a version of Tolstoy’s story God Sees the Truth, But Waits; and Norte, The End of History (2013), a loose reworking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Sometimes however, the sheer opacity and impenetrability of his film-making, and of course his natural tendency to let his features run to epic length – and beyond – has been forbidding. In some ways, his work is the cinematic equivalent of open-ended plainsong.

The comparison is not entirely arbitrary. Because the extraordinary thing about Season of the Devil is that it is a bizarre sort of musical. The majority of it is sung through. But there is no chance of a original soundtrack album of Season of the Devil going to iTunes. Because the singing in it of a bleakly subdued sort. It is all unaccompanied and the melodies are a kind of moaning lullaby-lament, the same for the Marcos militia gangsters as for their oppressed civilian victims. The identical musical style is disconcerting, but conveys the sense that everyone is labouring under the same grim harmonies of evil and despair. This musical conceit put me in mind of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary about Indonesia, The Act of Killing (2012). Season of the Devil is shot in a deep-focus monochrome, in a series of scenes each shot from a fixed camera position. This makes for some superbly composed images, particularly the exterior daylight locations. But Diaz has an exasperating habit of shooting indoors in the semi-darkness with a single light source directed straight into the camera. In many ways, Season of the Devil isn’t an easy watch.

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