The Rites of May

A Mediumistic Camera

In dim light, while Catholic prayers are recited around a turning table, a group of women forms a circle with a medium. A mother and daughter inquire about the eldest daughter, whose whereabouts have been unknown for some time. The woman confirms their suspicion: Rosa is dead, but they must wait until Good Friday to speak with her. As the prologue ends, a Volkswagen Beetle—locally known as Carocha in Portugal—arrives from Manila at a village near San Ildefonso, along dirt roads and past wooden houses. Inside is a photographer returning to his hometown to document the rites of Holy Week. Jun's mother has been dead for years, his father sits motionless in a wheelchair, and everything in the century-old family home reeks of secrets. The winding stairs, the flickering lights, the dark hallways, the father's mysterious illness—all seem to suggest that there must be, there simply must be, some skeleton in the closet of this haunted house.

Nothing feels solid in this humid, sweltering landscape. Nothing is entirely unambiguous in these muted tones, somewhere between brown and green. As Jun roams through the community with his foreign camera, the film catalogs uncanny presences and gradually builds a powerful atmosphere of indeterminacy. A wide-eyed man prays, repeating the word itim ("black" in Filipino), casting doubt on his existential status. A line of women crosses the church on their knees, chanting in unison. Catholic litanies punctuate the soundtrack, which begins to host a ritualistic trance that permeates the entire film. The agony of some, the sleeplessness of others—there is a fascination with in-between states, with thresholds between one condition and another. Even before a spirit disrupts the narrative, even before the texture of dreams seeps into every corner of the house, everything in The Rites of May, also known as Itim, is imbued with a sense of mediumship.

During one of his wanderings, Jun meets Teresa, Rosa’s sister. An instant fascination arises between them, mediated by the click of the photographic apparatus—but the relationship falters from the outset. There is something ancestral that blocks their connection, and the family's mystery spreads through the film’s very fabric. Jun witnesses a Passion play staged along an empty road; something jolts within him, and he bolts off in an attempt to prevent his father’s death. There are subterranean alliances, unsettling ties between the visible and the invisible. Teresa sends a note to her mother signed in Rosa’s name, and before long, she will be unable to stop the imminent possession by her deceased sister. In this daylight phantasmagoria, there are dead who seem alive—and the living who appear to have already crossed over.

More than sculpting time, the editing in The Rites of May tears through it again and again. The jump scare is no longer a sudden rupture, as in the horror films that inspired Mike de Leon; instead, it becomes embedded in the film’s rhythm like a convenient parasite. There are slow motions and frozen frames, abrupt cuts and sharp parallelisms—but everything here belongs to a tepid, aquatic kind of horror, suited to the sweltering pace of fermentation. The editing is not a gallop toward a destination, but like the cavalo—the possessed body—in certain tropical religions: it allows itself to be moved by the spirits scattered across the land, by the music of the prayer women, by the tempos of ritual and dream. When the narrative is overtaken by interruption, when the photography bursts its highlights to accommodate the nightmare, when the blur distorts the furniture to conjure delirium—there will be no surprise. The film’s waking state has already long been possessed by trance. The Rites of May is a film of spirits and of ghosts—but the kind that are everywhere, that never fully detach from the everyday.

In the stacking of saintly sculptures across the rooms the film traverses, in the half-light of wood-paneled interiors or the sweltering haze of the open air, in the ambiguity of uncertain photographs, The Rites of May becomes an inventory of intermediate presences—between flesh and image. And if the photographic camera is a trigger for revelations that only it can uncover, it is not in the manner of Antonioni’s Blow-up. Here, the device is just one more mediation in a world already teeming with other mediators. In The Rites of May, the protagonists, the lighting, the camera, the landscape—all become mediumistic: porous surfaces, thresholds between the living and the dead, between matter and memory. In this dance of permeabilities, spirits are invited to move among us.