Nocebo (2022) poster

Nocebo (2022)

Rating:


Ireland/Philippines. 2022.

Crew

Director – Lorcan Finnegan, Screenplay – Garrett Shanley, Producers – Brunella Cocchiglia & Emily Leo, Photography – Jakub Kijowski & Radek Ladczuk, Music – Jose Antonio C. Buencamino, Visual Effects – UMedia VFX (Supervisor – Jelmen Palsterman), Special Effects Supervisor – Kevin Byrne, Prosthetic & Creature Design – Creatures Inc, Ltd. SFX (Designer – Conor O’Sullivan, Supervisors – Charlie Bluett & Robert Trenton), Production Design – Lucy Van Lonkhuyzen. Production Company – XYZ Films/Fis Eirann (Screen Ireland)/Media Finance Capital/IPR.VC/Film Development Council of the Philippines/Film Philippines Lovely Productions/Wild Swim Films/EpicMedia/UMedia.

Cast

Eva Green (Christine), Chai Fonacier (Diana), Mark Strong (Felix), Billie Gadsdon (Bobs), Raquel Regalado (Diana’s Mother), Angelo Paragoso (Factory Supervisor)


Plot

Christine runs a successful company that designs clothing for children. One day, she walks into the store and has a vision of a rabid dog. Afterwards, she begins to feel ill and suffers confusion and memory lapses, even though doctors can find no cause. She is surprised by the arrival of Diana, a maid from the Philippines, who has come to tend her young daughter Bobs. Diana has folk healing remedies that offer relief to what ails Christine. However, a darker truth soon becomes evident beneath Diana’s remedies.


Nocebo was the third film for Irish director Lorcan Finnegan. Finnegan had previously made Without Name (2016), about a man at a cottage in a mysterious forest that may contain supernatural things and the appealingly strange Vivarium (2019) about a couple trapped in a mysterious never-ending suburb and forced to raise a strange child. All three films are also written by Garrett Shanley.

Nocebo is a good deal more straightforward than Lorcan Finnegan’s previous two films. Without Name was enigmatic and mysterious, while Vivarium was a work that rested within surrealism. By contrast, the plot here runs in a linear direction and there is an eventual explanation for what is going on. What we have is in fact a work of Folk Horror with an eventual Supernatural Retribution plot.

Eva Green is an actress I have always hard a great liking for. Here she plays at her acidically tart best, with a maximum of neurosis and made up with a distinctly unhealthy pallor. Against this, Filipino actress Chai Fonacier plays with an elfin earth mother warmth that slowly inveigles its way into the home, while soon revealing a darker undertow. In some ways, you can look upon Nocebo as the horror version of Mary Poppins (1964) where rather than coming to bring out the inner child of her wards, a magically empowered nanny comes to bring out the family’s buried secrets.

Eva Green and the maid Diana (Chai Fonacier) in Nocebo (2022)
Christine (Eva Green) (r) and the myserious maid Diana (Chai Fonacier) (l)

Beneath its Folk Horror aspect, Nocebo is really a social horror film about the underprivileged and exploited of the world coming back to target Western privilege. This seems to have become a new theme in recent years – see also Slaxx (2020). But it goes back as far as Hammer Films and works like The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and The Reptile (196) where we saw repressed British colonial guilt emerging to strike back at the empire.

There is the same sense here of the victims of Filipino sweatshop tragedies coming to exact revenge against the Western business owners who were responsible for the situation. The end credits dedicate the film to ‘Justice for All Kentex Workers’, referring to the Kentex tragedy in Metro Manila in 2015 where a fire broke out at a footwear manufacturer and workers were trapped inside the building unable to get out, resulting in 74 dead (although, unlike in the film, the Kentex factory was a local business and not a sweatshop for any international clothing manufacturer).

I don’t know, I think I far prefer my horror films to be allegorical ones rather than ones that seem to have a need to directly preach social issues to me. Here it feels as though the interesting building horror element of the first half ends up being subverted by the filmmakers standing still to wave a large placard and hammer home points in unsubtle ways.


Trailer here


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