Season of the Devil

In the late 1970s, an army militia terrorizes the innocent inhabitants of a remote village in a Philippine jungle. A young doctor opens a humanitarian clinic, but soon after, disappears without a trace. Her husband, a poet, teacher, and activist, sets out to search for her, forced to face a community ravaged by dictatorship and violence. Lav Diaz’s new film is an extraordinary musical, a sort of Filipino rock opera featuring sung dialogues. Running 234 minutes—a short opus compared to some of the esteemed director’s earlier works—the film draws on real-life characters and events to create a love story that unveils a particularly dark era in Filipino history under Fernando Marcos’s dictatorship.