At four and three-quarter hours, the latest butt-numbing opus by Filipino auteur Lav Diaz is a veritable TikTok video by his standards. A needling and occasionally deranged assault on the Philippines’ most recent turn into authoritarianism, this monochrome sci-fi dystopia takes place in 2034 after a series of volcanic explosions has permanently darkened the skies, and the “Dark Killer” flu epidemic is tearing through the population (it was shot pre-Covid). President Nirvano Navarra (Joel Lamangan) – whose stocky physique and wild pronouncements make a fairly obvious match for real-life incumbent Rodrigo Duterte – decides to use the crisis to put a heavy lid on a simmering crockpot of dissidents.
Meted out mostly in long and often patience-stretching static takes, and in humdrum locations despite sci-fi inflections such as omnipresent flying drones, Diaz follows both Navarra’s retinue and the opposition. The leader is mollycoddled by two buttoned-up aides, Martha Officio (Hazel Orencio) and Marissa Ventura (Mara Lopez) – who are having an affair, though the latter also moonlights with history teacher turned sex worker Haminilda (Shaina Magdayao). Meanwhile, soulful resistance fighter Hook Torollo (Piolo Pascual) swans in like something from a Wong Kar-wai film. He hangs moodily with the oppressed, but is forced into an assassination attempt after Navarra unleashes Operation Black Rain, a plot to poison rebel enclaves under cover of the epidemic.
There’s a lot going on here, though Diaz’s geological pace helps digest it. This ultra-measured style, rarely venturing out of mid-shot, sometimes feels like a sinister surveillance of a repressed society in the vein of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau project. But the director also makes his partisan colours clear, lampooning Navarra’s infantile psychology and leaving the rebels to linger in romanticised shadow. His polarised alt-reality often feels a bit forced: Black Rain begins on the anniversary of Nagasaki, and there’s an under-exploited plotline about a second national epidemic of forgetfulness.
The satire connects hardest when it swings for all-out absurdity. Navarra – played with romping relish by Lamangan – is a hilarious creation, prone to strange emotional tantrums that he must quell with a dose of noise guitar on the stereo. The truth he tries so hard to suppress seems to be erupting anyway. At one point, he apologises to his pet ostrich. The Halt is alarmingly in tune with the buffoonish violence that has given Duterte, and the world’s current cabal of nationalist clowns, their elemental appeal.
• The Halt is available on Mubi on 12 July.
