Nadine Lustre in ‘Nokturno’

One night, Joana (Bea Binene) made her way to a nearby motel where she was going to meet up with her boyfriend Manu (Wilbert Ross). They were planning to go to Manila to get away from her mother Lilet’s (Eula Valdez) oppressive superstitious beliefs about mysterious beings who came knocking at doors and cause death when allowed to enter. When Manu left her alone to buy some food, Joana began to hear someone knocking on her room’s door.

This is the second horror film that acclaimed director Mikhail Red did with popular actress Nadine Lustre after “Deleter” (2022), the top box office hit and Best Picture of the Metro Manila Film Festival that year. Oddly, their second project together was released direct to streaming on Amazon Prime Video, on October 31, just in time for Halloween, when many Filipinos look for scary movies to watch. By 9 p.m., it already hit No. 1 on the local charts.

Lustre played Lilet’s eldest daughter Jamie, who defied her mother’s efforts to keep her family together and instead went abroad to work. When she came home after something untoward happened to her sister Joana, she was still at odds with her mother’s beliefs about this curse on their family. Youngest sibling Julius (JJ Quilantang) was loyal to his mother and believed everything she said, yet he also agreed to go visit Manila when Jamie invited him

Lustre’s acting talent has not lost its luster even though she had been inactive on the big screen since “Deleter.” Eula Valdez remains to be a powerful screen presence even when her time onscreen was relatively short. Veteran character actor Ku Aquino gave a sincere portrayal of Lilet’s brother Jun. Young Quilantang held his own among his senior co-stars. Even Wilbert Ross overcame his usual comic persona to give a creditable dramatic turn.

The technical aspects of this film were topnotch as with other Mikhail Red works. The clean and crisp cinematography of Ian Alexander Guevara, the eerie production design of Ana Lou Sanchez, the musical scoring of Myka Magsaysay and Paul Sigua — all deserve commendation for creating the unnerving atmosphere. The design of the “Kumakatok” with his tall height, flowing black cloak and gnarly hands, also worked well in this regard.

However, despite all of this high production values, I felt a problem in the storytelling — from the screenplay by Nikolai Red and Rae Red to the overall direction of Mikhail Red. In spite of the fact that the movie ran only for 1 hour and 20 minutes, it felt much longer than that. The reason why Lilet’s family was targeted by the Kumakatok was not even clear to me. The pace was too slow, building up to nothing much, until that abrupt let-down of an ending.