film, eyeballs, brain

I stopped calling movies slow a long time ago, but Ato Bautista’s Blackout is sloooow. A psychological thriller about an alcoholic landlord (nicely played by Robin Padilla, complete with greasy hair and ugly glasses) prone to blackouts, the film could use faster pacing to communicate the main character’s rising panic — either that, or the turgidity is meant to represent Padilla’s alcohol-addled mind. In any case, it’s a bit of a slog, and Bautista squanders the opportunity to mess with the audience’s heads: there’s some promising scenery-fiddling early in the film that I thought would lead to a good “Can You Spot the Difference?” game, but unfortunately not. Instead we get a more conventional “Is This Alcoholic Delirium, Or Is This Really Happening?”

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