Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)

Lino Brocka’s Insiang is a sensational tale of oppression leading to unleashed self-determination, drawing on classic melodrama structures of identification and sympathy while entirely rooted in its challenged time and place (the mid-70s Manila slums, and apparently filmed in just eleven miraculous days). Setting the tone with stomach-churning opening images from inside a slaughterhouse, it then plunges us deep into a vividly sweaty setting of claustrophobic, gossipy community and wretchedly strained economics, with the title character (beautifully played by Hilda Koronel) gradually emerging as a focal point from within a large, chaotic extended family. Insiang’s mother kicks out the relatives so that her much younger lover can move in, but his real desire is for Insiang; he rapes her, and when Insiang tells her mother, she gets slapped for it, blamed as a scheming temptress. After her one escape plan – to get married to a boy who says he loves her – ends in yet more mistreatment, Insiang gradually hones a capacity to control her sexuality, while planning revenge over all those who’ve wronged her, all the way to inciting murder. Brocka’s filming of the climactic event is memorable, intercutting Psycho-like knife strokes with Insiang’s possessed expression as she watches what she’s wrought, evoking (a couple of years in advance) Amy Irving in The Fury as she conjures up her destructive supernatural powers. But there’s no pretense here that this solves anything: in the final scene she’s entirely alone, her prospects in the community and sense of herself unspecified and unclear. A quieter, sadder film takes place around the edges of the narrative, of young people with dreams of something better but no ready way of realizing them, either struggling along in menial jobs or else just hanging around getting drunk; even the mean-spirited, shrewish mother and her thuggish boyfriend are shown to be motivated by real vulnerabilities.