Phantosmia

North American Premiere

Official Selection, 2024 Venice Film Festival Official Selection
2024 Busan International Film Festival

Hilarion is a renowned former sharpshooter with a stink in his nose. Years after his days as a sergeant, when he witnessed and perpetuated government-by-gunfire, he’s afflicted with this phantom stench that he can’t sneeze away, and which keeps him from enjoying food or a normal social life. A psychologist says it’s called phantosmia, and the only way to shed the condition is to re-immerse himself in the source of his traumas. And so Hilarion returns to the violence, the armaments, the culture of surveillance and fear. He takes a job at a penal colony, where his former military regalia may be respected, but the new generation of wardens and majors hide from him horrors he can’t immediately sniff out.

In director Lav Diaz’s telling, historical trauma lingers in the body. But it also lingers in the air like a national stink. Diaz’s aggressively long takes and stark black and white cinematography is like an x-ray to contemporary fascism in the Philippines, revealing such characters as the power-lusting Major Lukas, the imprisoned adopted daughter Reyna, and even a mythological creature of the jungle, who evokes a pre-modern Philippines but also attracts men and women with guns. When terror begets trauma begets terror, the illusion of recovery and salvation is perhaps the sickest phantom of all.

– Brian Hu