‘Posthouse’ REVIEW: Death by cold open
‘Posthouse’ REVIEW: Death by cold open
Cyril (Sid Lucero) kneels before the manananggal | Still courtesy of Viva Films
Minor spoilers ahead for Posthouse
An opening scene sets the stage in any film, but in horror, it casts the spell. It’s where the filmmaker lures us in, weaving mood and atmosphere, letting shadows whisper and unseen things stir. A fleeting glimpse of the terror waiting just beyond the frame. When I think of truly haunting openings, I think of the isolated Puritan family in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, kneeling in prayer, giving thanks for a salvation they believe was promised to them. The camera drifts toward the treeline, where the woods loom like a wall, vast and indifferent, holding within them the unseen forces that will one day unravel the family.
I also think of Zach Cregger’s recent Weapons, where the stillness of 2:17 AM in white, middle-class suburbia is broken by the creak of doors opening, George Harrison in the air, and 17 children spilling and disappearing into the vast of night, an image that plants a mystery destined to unmake an entire town.
Or it could simply be two co-workers on a rooftop in Dodo Dayao’s Violator, a man and a woman talking about something so mundane I can’t even remember the words. What I can’t forget is what comes after. The man leaves, the woman remains. She undresses, folds her clothes neatly on the floor, climbs onto the parapet. And then a crash, followed by bloodcurling screams, and with it the unnerving sense that something is irrevocably wrong in this seemingly ordinary world.
And then there is Posthouse, the feature debut of Nikolas Red, brother of filmmaker Mikhail Red and longtime editor on his films such as Deleter, Lilim, Arisaka, and Nokturno, just to name a few. It tells the story of a troubled editor, Cyril (Sid Lucero), and his estranged daughter, Rea (Bea Binene), who, while attempting to restore an unfinished silent horror movie, unwittingly release an ancient creature into their world. Its opening carries the markings of something unforgettable, the kind that promises to etch itself into memory.
All the ingredients are there. A large, dark, empty house. The lighting drapes the rooms in uneasy shadows, the score swells with a thrum of menace, and the framing is precise. A man, his back turned to us, works on something, unmindful of what shares the space with him. A boy wanders the dark corners, gripped by a fear he cannot name. From an old television, Estudyante Blues flickers and drones through the halls, its images casting a ghostly glow that makes the house feel less like a home and more like the site where something terrible is about to happen.
For a few fleeting moments, I was caught in it — the unease was thick in the air, the mise-en-scène working in harmony, mining unease from a simple shot of a stairwell receding into nothingness, evoking the kind of slow-burn dread you’d find in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. And then, it crashes and burns.
The film tips its hand way too soon, unveiling its monster not with mystery but with a harsh spotlight, leaving us face-to-face with a creature whose design looks closer to a party-store costume than a figure of terror. What should have lingered in the shadows is instead laid bare, laughable where it should have been haunting, and with that, the spell is broken.
The manananggal in Posthouse | Still courtesy of Viva Films
What follows is a horror film drained of tension, stripped of menace, and with little left in its arsenal to unsettle. Scene after scene unfolds without bite or mystery, leaving the horror element more ornamental than visceral, a faint echo of what the opening moments promised. Red reaches for inspired sources such as Hideo Kojima’s Playable Teaser (P.T.) for the cancelled horror video game Silent Hills, with its looping corridors of mounting dread, and the chiaroscuro play of noir, where shadows suggest more than they reveal. He deploys these influences with a kind of visual flair that looks striking on screen, yet these touches register more as references than building blocks, never coalescing into a sustained atmosphere of dread. Rather than deepening the unease, they linger as gestures, reminders of a richer horror that never quite arrives.
And as the film goes on, a pattern becomes clear: Posthouse has a habit of showing its cards too early, answering questions long before they’ve even had the chance to take shape, and doing so in the most infantilizing ways. Who’s the "monster"? A nightmare sequence spells it out, literally showing who it is and what he’s done. Carlitos Siguion-Reyna even appears to deliver another masterclass in exposition, echoing his recent work in P77. Why is there a curse? One character does a quick Google search to provide the answer.
And if that weren’t enough, there was the exposition dump blaring from a television screen in the opening, just in case we somehow missed the point. Sure, revealing pieces of a puzzle is part of the fun in horror, but here it’s done all at once, like a jigsaw where nearly the whole picture is already clear, leaving only a single dull, convenient corner piece to be fitted in.
What is the film about? At one point, a character explains the theme of the film — the Kuleshov effect — shockingly, to a supposed editor. By the end, we cycle back to this, repurposed as a clumsy parallel to the nature-versus-nurture debate, literally shouted at the audience with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Are monsters born, or are they made? Apparently, it doesn’t matter because a monster is created either way. So, the Kuleshov effect doesn’t even make sense as a thematic anchor in that context.
It seems to me that it is not interested in horror as a subconscious experience, but as something spelled out, explained, and flattened — every shadow illuminated, every terror announced, leaving nothing to linger, nothing to haunt, and nothing to truly unsettle. And with a film like this, as a writer making sense of it, what do I even write about? By the time the credits roll, even in a dark and empty theater at ten in the evening, you won’t feel so much as a trace of fear. Posthouse has left the night completely unfrightening.
‘Posthouse’ is now showing in cinemas.
