Reflection on Lav Diaz’s ‘Season of the Devil’ (2018)

At some point in your life after you have seen too many movies, you started giving merit to a movie for its rareness. Lav Diaz is definitely one of the rarest finds in the world of filmmaking. It may be easy to underappreciate or overappreciate his movies, as there are very few to compare them with.

It is easy to underappreciate the exhaustive amount of work that go into his picture-perfect compositions and meticulously detailed mise-en-scene out of favor of his preference for torturous pacing. It is also easy to overappreciate his penchant for poetic recital set in mystical tropical forests and enveloped in classic black-and-white cinematography (a “cheat” as some photographers may say).