Kulam
Mag-Ingat ka Sa... Kulam has mostly been promoted as the grand return of Judy Ann Santos to the Regal fold. While that’s certainly exciting news, it highlights what went wrong in the production of this picture. Sure, Judy Ann Santos is a great actress, but even great actresses need good stories and good filmmaking. Mag-Ingat Ka Sa…Kulam has its priorities wrong, and everybody suffers for it.
Mira has just been in a car accident. She wakes up in a hospital bed with amnesia. She remembers nothing about her life with her husband Paul, her blind daughter Sophie, or her work as a real estate agent, which has mostly kept her away from home. She returns to their house, and tries to get back into the swing of things with the help of her family. But she begins to notice strange things happening around the house. She sees apparitions of a spirit who seems to wish harm upon her. As she discovers more about herself and her life before the accident, she also begins to realize that there might be something more sinister at work.
The concept is sound enough, but they don’t make very good use of it. Local witchcraft is a fascinating subject, and had they really tried to tell a story about it, this could’ve been interesting. But the use of witchcraft here is barely window dressing, and the movie is really nothing more than just another ghost story. Had they concentrated more on the witchcraft motif, they might’ve been able to justify the big twist of this film, which in its current form doesn’t really work well. The characters are kind of inconsistent, and that makes the entire third act rather shaky narrative-wise.
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