Aurora

Kudos to the cinematography, but the plot, characters, theme and type of conflict are frustrating. The movie lacked a unique story line that did not take advantage of the setting.

Napaka pangit na pelikula. Gin de Mesa please po wag na kayong gumawa ng pelikula. Please please please po. Zero 🌟

Aurora: A Philippines horror film involving a ship wreck and ghosts wanting to go home. A coastal village has been visited by death in the form of a shipwreck, the remains of the ship are visible on rocks close to shore. Relatives seek the remains of their loved ones but many bodies are still missing, perhaps trapped in the wreck. The event has cast a dark cloud over the village, fishermen can no longer sell their catch, peope move to the city. Leanna (Anne Curtis) runs an inn, when the relatives of the victims leave she is without customers and links up with fishermen to collect rewards for recovering the missing bodies. But she and her young sister Rita (Phoebe Villamor) catch glimpses of strange characters, hear voices and even seem to make contact with spirits of the missing.

A slow moving film which might have benefited from a 15 minute cut in it's running time. However it was massive success in the Philippines, made for P$3 million, it took in P$100 million at the box-office. The ghosts are well imagined and appear to be seeking closure just as much as their relatives are. While not malevolent they will seize on to divers who approach the wreck. Ghosts appear in windows and flashbacks of the grounding of the ship are related through stories and visions. A cover-up may have taken place and the real cause of the shipwreck turns out to be even more frightening than any conspiracy could hope to conceal. Director/co-writer Yam Laranas delivers an engaging Ghost Story. 7/10. On Netflix.

Cinematography & musical score is a good 10/10 for a local film. I consider this as an art film where you try to grasp and confuse yourself from its storyline. The film starts to boast its great cinematography and fresh take in color-grading - for a local film, that's very impressive. I find myself trying to think of ways to make Aurora a good horror/thriller film that will leave the audience shrieking for jump scares. Aurora has tons of eerie shots which is quite effective in one (literally just one) jump scare from the whole movie but I still think they could've done better.

The ending was confusing, it's one of those psychological films where they want the audience to create their own plot that leaves the story open-ended with a lot of "Hows" & "Whys". Overall it's a fresh new take in cinematography and color-grading when it comes to local films, I hope to see more local films like Aurora that's well executed everything is a 10/10 the only thing wrong with it is how they deliver the plot - it's a messy shipwreck.

I didn't really enjoy the movie, but in case the people that worked in it are reading these, I'm going to write first about the one thing I really enjoyed about the movie: It managed to scare and make me feel uneasy WITHOUT JUMPSCARES. This is a massive accomplishment, given that nowadays most horror movies relly on them.

This movie is sad but not in a "dramatic movie" way. It's sad because it could have been an awesome horror movie but they, somehow, managed to do everything wrong.

The first hour of the movie is full of drama and sadness, a ship crashes near a small town and suddenly everyone is leaving. The reason is the ship that crashed, but there's not much explaining of that, so I don't know if it was because they thought it was haunted or because the town's economy relied on tourists that would not come because of a shrunken ship. I don't know, and there was plenty of time to explain it, yet they didn't.

Then there's the two sisters' story... At the very beginning I thought they were mother and daughter but then it turns out they're not. Their family story is told in a really brief, out of context flashback, which leaves you confused for a few seconds until you kind of understand what's going on. Yet again, that part of the story was interesting and I would have loved for them to show us more of that, because it gives you the reasons for most of the things the main character, Leanna, does.

There's many other stuff that I think was easy to correct but they somehow missed it, characters that seem to appear and disappear out of nowhere without really adding to the plot, or they add so little that they were just a misuse of budget.

Then, the ending is just so poor and it could have been such a masterpiece. This makes me so sad. It's weird, they tie real life stuff that could be real and awesome with a weird ghost story, extremely poor and undeveloped, the ending is just weird.

The worst thing about the movie was that I spent one hour and 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. It's awful, it's boring. Really if you consider watching this movie, just watch the introduction and then fast forward it to the end, most of the movie is a waste of time.