Mae Paner

In the northern Philippine province of Luzon, a law school dropout commits a horrific double murder, a gentle family man takes the fall and receives a life sentence, leaving behind a wife and two kids. At their best, Lav Diaz’s marathon movies reveal just how much other films leave out. In his devastating twelfth feature (at over four hours in length, one of his shortest), the broad canvas accommodates both the irreducible facts of individual experience and the cosmic sweep of time and space. A careful rethinking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment shot in blazing colour, this tour de force offers a masterful recapitulation of Diaz’s longstanding obsessions: cultural memory, national guilt, and the origin of evil. The wounds and defeats of Filipino history loom large in each of Diaz’s films. Fabian, the tortured anti-hero superbly played by Sid Lucero, may well be his most indelible creation, a haunting embodiment of the dead ends of ideology.