Lausanne 2024 Review: MAKAMISA: PHANTASM OF REVENGE Confronts the Ghosts of Colonial Power through Subversive Silent Cinema
Filipino provocateur Khavn de la Cruz conjures a surreal and abrasive vision of colonial-era Philippines, refracting the nation's complex history through a fractured lens of experimental and silent cinema in Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge. The film’s eerie silences, juxtaposed with hand-colored 35mm footage, feel less like a narrative and more like a fever dream, unraveling across a barren historical landscape marked by colonial violence and religious corruption.
Adapted from José Rizal’s unfinished novel Makamisa, the filmmaker takes creative liberties to transform the literary relic into a hallucinatory experience. The characters, including the malevolent Spanish priest (Khavn de la Cruz) and the sorrowful Filipino poet Rizal (John Lloyd Cruz), vie for the affections of an American woman descending into madness, Crazy Sisa (Lilith Stangenberg), —a grim metaphor for the country’s own descent into the abyss of colonial subjugation.
De la Cruz’s filmmaking has always inhabited the margins—politically, aesthetically, and thematically—and Makamisa fits comfortably within the radical body of work that defines his career. Known for his fierce rejection of conventional filmmaking, the director’s style is a deliberate revolt against narrative coherence, favoring instead raw, jagged imagery and an uncompromising critique of imperial power.
His previous films, such as Balangiga: Howling Wilderness and Mondomanila, have explored themes of colonial exploitation and social decay, often blurring the lines between history, myth, and nightmare. In Makamisa, de la Cruz again returns to these themes, but his experimental approach here is more distilled—eschewing dialogue and relying on scratched, colorized frames that evoke early cinema’s ghostly aesthetic.
Placed within the context of de la Cruz’s filmography, Makamisa stands out as both an homage to and a disruption of cinematic and historical traditions. The filmmaker’s punk ethos—disrespectful of established forms and authoritative narratives—merges with Rizal’s unfinished text to create something that is both an anti-colonial statement and an avant-garde meditation on the fluidity of memory and history.
Like much of de la Cruz’s work, this film revels in its contradictions: it is at once a historical epic and an intimate tale, a grotesque fable and a poetic reflection on trauma. The decision to render Makamisa without dialogue places emphasis on the disjointed, almost fractured visual style, as if de la Cruz seeks to excavate history’s unsaid truths through the manipulation of image alone.
The film itself, running at just over an hour, feels more like an installation than a traditional feature. Its narrative thread is thin, intentionally so—de la Cruz’s interest lies in the visceral, in the symbolic clash of religion, power, and madness. The evil priest embodies the cruel legacy of Spanish colonialism, while Rizal’s poet figure functions as both a tragic hero and a cipher for the nation’s intellectual resistance.
Meanwhile, the Stangenberg´s character of Crazy Sisa, whose madness becomes the central force of the film, evokes the chaos and psychic fragmentation brought about by the violent upheavals of colonial rule. De la Cruz’s meticulous reworking of the film's visual texture—scratches, flickers, and a muted color palette—further emphasizes the instability of these identities, as if the very medium of film itself is breaking under the weight of history.
Musically, Makamisa is underscored by a haunting soundtrack from David Toop and Khavn’s own Kontra-Kino Orchestra, which heightens the film’s otherworldly quality. The score, much like the visuals, is dissonant and erratic, providing an unsettling accompaniment to the film’s disjointed narrative. The use of sound, or its frequent absence, reflects the desolation and fragmentation that permeate both the story and its historical context.
Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge does not attempt to faithfully adapt Rizal’s unfinished work as de la Cruz deconstructs both the form and content of Rizal’s novel to comment on the continuing legacies of colonialism, not just in the Philippines. The film resists categorization—it is neither historical drama nor pure experiment, but something liminal, existing in the interstices between past and present, fiction and reality, cinema and protest but still rendered in de la Cruz´s trademark style of subversion and transgression with a more burlesque pang.
