MOVIE REVIEW: Kampon Brings Compelling Weirdness to the MMFF

(SPOT.ph) Kampon kicks off the strangeness rather quickly, as we see a young woman played by influencer Zeinab Harake brought to the house of a healer. When the healing doesn’t work out, the healer starts covering up the religious icons in her little hut before proposing another method of healing. Immediately, the movie sets up something unnerving: whatever it is that we’re about to see, the healer doesn’t want it seen by God.

It’s a nice little touch in a movie that will probably be remembered for its weird little details. The many pieces of this narrative don’t always hold together well, and there are bits of production that are less than what this movie really needed. But overall, the movie bears an oddly compelling sense of danger, generating horror as it builds the sense that there is just something wrong with the reality that these characters exist in.

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Synopsis of MMFF 2023 entry Kampon

The main plot involves married couple Clark and Eileen, played by Derek Ramsay and Beauty Gonzalez. The two cannot have children due to Clark being sterile, and while the couple has long accepted this fact, a series of events leads Eileen to once again explore the idea. This is when the child Jade shows up at their doorstep, played with real menace by Erin Espiritu. Jade alleges that Clark is her father, born of an affair that he had. While Clark tries to get to the bottom of Jade’s parentage, Eileen lets the child into their home and begins to entertain the possibility of becoming a mother.

Movie Review of MMFF 2023's Kampon

The first act is largely concerned with the relationship between Clark and Eileen, and the film quietly builds subtle horror in how Eileen is constantly confronted with the pressure of becoming a mother. She has friends tell her that she’s running out of time, and later she deals with the disappointment of failing to give her parents grandchildren. Gonzalez plays this all perfectly, showing off a painful longing matched with just a hint of resentment for a husband that she loves but cannot give her what she wants.

When Jade enters the picture, the horror becomes more overt, and the focus shifts to Clark getting to the bottom of the mystery. This is where the movie falters a bit. The story loses momentum as it teases answers that aren't really that interesting. And Clark can't really do much as an investigator, his investigation largely amounting to waiting for test results and then suddenly remembering things. 

To be fair, Ramsay is great in the role. He tends to do well in parts where he has to play weak, and he does a lot here to reflect Clark's tenuous grip on his reality. In the horror scenes, it's really his reactions that sell the terror. Besides the fear derived from whatever awful thing he's seeing, there is the added sense of a man on the verge of losing everything. 

Kampon can’t quite make all of its pieces fit together. At times, scenes will just end abruptly. The visual effects are not very good and might take people right out of the film’s tenuous reality. But all in all, the movie is fun and weird in the right ways. It finds both horror and dark comedy in the madness of a world that can’t leave a childless couple alone; one that keeps telling them that their life isn’t complete until they’ve given birth. It is from this madness that the film finds its distinct sense of weirdness, leading to at least a couple of scenes that we might be talking about for a while.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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