Nocebo
Ahh, good old creepy-ass horror, disgusting and inhumane parasites, but there are also ticks and burnt flesh. It’s like an intense John Carpenter film.
A damn aristo couple, one of those really upper class people, with a massive house and 6 figures of cars on the driveway are happy to live this mundane life. The guy is some advertising exec (the modern kind, not Mad Men), but he doesn’t really matter much, this is one for the ladies.
Our protagonist is a luxury clothes designer. As worse, for kids. As if fast fashion wasn’t bad enough, it’s for kids. She’s at the top of her game, drawing and painting clothes on paper, but when it comes to actually create the clothes themselves, it’s all outsourced to faraway countries like the Philippines.
Ah, there’s also a little daughter, but the parents don’t pay her much attention, even if she is bullied in her extremely expensive private school.
One day, our protagonist is at some fashion show for kids (yikes!), she gets an important call, and then encounters a dog with rotten chunks of flesh and a ticks, one of which bites her. This her spiral into madness, she goes completely crazy from that point.
Cecilia gets some mysterious illness with ill defined symptoms, including memory loss, having to sleep with a CPAP machine. Apparently, the symptoms disappear when she goes to the doctor. Purely psychosomatic (You’re a nut! You are crazy in the coconut!).
Enter Diana, a cute small Filipina, presenting herself as the new live-in help. Cecilia assumes she forgot about this, and receives her to best of her abilities, which she finds just great. Her husband and daughter don’t find it funny, and are both extremely rude to her. She takes it in stride and wins them over by the stomach, cooking some great Filipino dish.
As she acclimates to the house and everything, Diana becomes close to the boss, and even the little girl softens up, but the father remains sceptical of the new age woo and foreign words.
It seems the husband was wrong, since after some native ritual, the wife get back to her doldrums without much more pain and suffering. Once you get there, you will not come back from edge, nor to go back to western medicine. The husband peeks around Diana’s bedroom (which she thinks invades her privacy and makes him go away), and after more sleuthing finds the missing medicine.
After this breach of trust, Diana is expelled from the house, but the kid is turned to her side just in time. The protagonist goes further paranoid and starts suspecting her husband too. The sickness returns even harder now, as Diana is actively encouraging the ticks. She goes ballistic in public, with her daughter present even, and so hits the bed and stays there.
The husband is taken out of the equation for a while, after he falls on the stairs, and Diana returns for the climax: the protagonist is forced to relieve Diana’s life in the Philippines. With some mirrored aspects, she also took her kid to work, since she could not stay anywhere else. Cecilia shows up to the sweatshop, demanding increases in production, so they have to pull a double shift. She also demands the main door be locked to avoid theft of the clothes, and takes a truly degrading picture with Diana’s kid. She is slumming it HARD.
After a while it gets really hot for everyone, particularly for the kid, so Diana takes a pay cut to get her some coconut water. A fire breaks out and many workers and the kid are burned alive, for the sake of some t-shirts. Cecilia is the true parasite, a tick, and so she must burn too, in her own house. The psychosomatic illness was guilt into having killed hundreds to sustain her lavish lifestyle, like any bourgeois leech.
Diana did all this to relieve the final moments of her daughter. As her work is done, she jumps off the roof. She was some kind of witch doctor, there was a weird little bird living inside her, and after her death, it moves on to the little kid, she’s the supernatural entity now.
If you want to compare and contrast, watch The Devil Wears Prada and weep.
The Philippines names in the credits are very unexpected, there’s a mix of classic Spanish with Greek surnames like Menelaus. The disco scene has some great dance music too, feels like Brazilian funk, but less rhythmic, more melodic, and with vocals that feel Latin-ish, but are just gibberish to my uncultured ears.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.