Feminist Necropoetics: The Female Corpse in Oda sa Wala (2018).

by: Farrah Freibert , March 24, 2026

In a crucial scene from Dwein Baltazar’s third film, Oda sa Wala (2018), Sonya (Marietta Subong), a struggling funeral parlour worker in a contemporary Bulacan town in the Philippines, squats beside a mortuary slab to rest as she contemplates how she will make ends meet. Atop the slab is an unidentified female corpse (Angelita Loresco) that had recently appeared in Sonya’s workplace under suspicious circumstances. In close-up, as Sonya sips from a glass, the cadaver’s arm twitches, forcefully colliding with the back of Sonya’s head. This results in the film’s only jump scare. The sequence is representative of the film’s focus on what I call ‘feminist necropoetics’, the affective and embodied contact between Sonya and the unidentified female corpse that portends into the film’s forging of generational solidarity among women. The film’s narrative follows Sonya’s everyday life at the funeral home, the second floor of which doubles as her and her father’s living quarters. As the plot progresses, Sonya increasingly incorporates the female corpse into her everyday life: bathing her, dressing her, and speaking to her as if she were an old friend or family member. Remarkably, in return for Sonya’s caretaking, the corpse seems to have the supernatural ability to affect Sonya’s business, and a succession of new customers follows her arrival. However, the increased business is not enough to address Sonya and her father’s debt; they are ultimately kicked out of the house by a greedy moneylender named Theodore (Dido Dela Paz) and must bury the corpse. The film concludes with a magical realist turn as Sonya finds the previously dead woman reanimated in a nearby forest.

The film’s focus on death, and dead women in particular, indexes its production and release during the necropolitical presidency of Rodrigo Duterte from 2016 to 2022.^[1] Duterte fomented vigilante violence and extrajudicial killings, and his marshalling of misogynist state terror was encapsulated in his threat to women on the left that: ‘Pusilon lang mo sa bisong arong (We will just shoot your vagina)’ (qtd. in Nonato 2018). Whereas the employment of corpses in Duterte-era visual culture in the Philippines has been critiqued for its ability to create pervasive anonymity (Campos 2020: 211) or, in some cases, for allowing Duterte an avenue to further assert his authority (McGrogan 2022), Dwein Baltazar and her crew employ formal strategies that center an unidentified woman’s corpse in relation to two other (dead) women to scaffold a historically-embedded critique of Duterte’s misogynist authoritarianism.

Feminist necropoetics is a theory of creative practice that formally situates gender and death within cultural products to critique the necropolitical conditions of hegemony. Rather than positioning depictions of the female corpse as always necessarily reactionary, this article supplements necropoetics (formal qualities of a media object that draw on death or representations of the dead) with the qualifier feminist in order to underscore how death imagery might be marshalled toward a critique of patriarchal authoritarianism and conditions of neocolonialism.^[2] Feminist necropoetics is thus a form of critique related to other politicised depictions of female corpses, such as a feminist intervention in the alignment of women with the abject in contemporary crime shows (Cutchin 2021) and an against-the-grain critique of the misogyny of canonical surrealism of the mid-twentieth century (Lim 2001: 65-68). In consonance with Terry Threadgold’s theorisation of feminist poetics as practices of cultural production that register the ‘corporeal trace’ (Threadgold 1997: 109) and ‘mak[e] meanings differently’ (Threadgold 1997: 109), Oda sa Wala’s feminist necropoetics registers the corporeal weight of gender and death within Duterte-era visual culture while also pushing the meaning of the female corpse beyond reactionary purposes and toward an uncanny notion of cross-generational solidarity.

After winning awards at local film festivals QCinema and FAMAS (Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences), Oda sa Wala circulated widely at global film festivals in Canada, the Czech Republic, and Malaysia. It is one of the few contemporary films from the Philippines to receive a Blu-ray release in the United States (via boutique Blu-ray distributor Kani Releasing). This global circulation alongside the film’s formal engagement with feminist necropoetics position Oda sa Wala within Patricia White’s capacious notion of contemporary global feminist cinema wherein ‘feature films in international circulation are uniquely important vectors of transnational feminist imagination and publicity’ (White 2015: 8). While not explicitly invoking the term feminist, in an interview contemporary to Oda sa Wala’s release, Baltazar firmly asserted a feminist concern for protecting women’s place in the film industry and shifting representations of women away from stereotypical ‘goodygoody characters’ (quoted in Arevalo 2019: C-4) in the face of industry pressures to conform to dominant gender norms. Specific to Oda sa Wala, Baltazar has discussed the themes of grief and loss in the film as part of her process of coming to terms with the possibility of losing a loved one: ‘grief is one of the things that I’m really afraid about because I still have all my loved ones here’ (Baltazar 2022). Baltazar’s filmmaking decisions that are aligned with such affective processes of attending to grief and loss resonate with what Jennifer Malkowski calls ‘working through’ (2017: 97), a feminist method of mediating death and mourning through practices of cultural production.

In this article, I argue that Oda sa Wala engages aesthetic techniques of feminist necropoetics—including aural repetition, transnational signification, contrapuntal cinematography, and morbid collectivity—to diegetically link three dead women, and thereby juxtapose three key historical moments in Philippine history as sites of gendered socio-economic struggle and solidarity. Such juxtapositions resonate with contemporaneous tactics of Philippine artists who have opposed extrajudicial killings by drawing connections across time between the Duterte regime, the Marcos dictatorship, and eras of American and Spanish colonialism; as Neferti Tadiar has described, such artists ‘are drawing on different times, reconnecting to past struggles through a replaying and recasting of images from those times, extending the timeline of social grief and broadening as well as redrawing the social body of that grief’ (2022: 265). In Oda sa Wala, Sonya (a living corpse as suggested by the director [Baltazar 2022]), the aural apparition of Sonya’s mother, and the unidentified corpse are triangulated as the film’s three dead female figures whose lives span a significant stretch of Philippine history. The women’s lives collectively form a relay across three generations – the 2010s, the 1990s, and the 1970s – that can each be identified with a period of crisis in the Philippines, respectively, the neo-fascist reign of Rodrigo Duterte, the corrupt jueteng republic under Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos. On the one hand, the film’s references to China emphasise Sonya’s relationship with her mother and situate the film within histories of diaspora and socioeconomic disenfranchisement that can be traced to the Marcos regime’s diplomatic relations with China. On the other hand, contrapuntal aesthetics connect Sonya with the unidentified corpse while simultaneously drawing continuities to the death-dealing hegemonies of other periods, such as the neoliberal era of Estrada and Arroyo (Lim 2011: 296-299; Tadiar 2022: 232). Regarding the film’s depictions of the gendered corpse, this article is in conversation with key works of postcolonial feminist film scholars who have elaborated the allegorical significance of women’s bodies (Tan 2010: 29-31) and dead bodies (Lim 2009: 155-71) for symbolising the nation and colonial history. Ultimately, I argue that the film brings three female characters into aesthetic and narrative relation to suggest the historical continuities among women’s deaths as outcomes of colonialism, globalisation, and authoritarianism.

Sonya and Her Mother: Sonic Repetition and Transnational Mise-en-scène

The relationship between the protagonist Sonya and her mother is reiterated throughout Oda sa Wala through techniques of sonic repetition and the transnational intricacies of the mise-en-scène, as signified by a repeated song and props that signify China. Through both formal traits, the film positions nationality as a haunting signifier of familial connection, the socio-economic structures of diaspora, and communication with the dead. By repeatedly linking references to China (through the soundtrack and the curation of props in the mise-en-scène) with the ghostly presence of Sonya’s mother, the film obliquely invokes Chinese and Philippine diasporic histories in Southeast Asia. While the film’s depiction of Sonya’s mother is extremely subtle, it suggests that she was either an overseas worker in China or, perhaps, a so-called Chinese Filipina—that is, a Chinese immigrant to the Philippines or a Chinese mestiza (a multiracial identity of Philippine and Chinese descent). Thus, as national symbols, the Chinese artefacts represent not only Sonya’s mother’s employment history or ethnic heritage, but also her mother’s material absence yet uncanny presence. Ultimately, the Chinese objects and sounds Sonya encounters in her home emphasise both Sonya’s connection to her mother and her mother’s transnational connection to China.

Historically, Chinese Filipinas/os have existed in Philippine society as both privileged and marginalised constituencies. A small percentage of upper-class Chinese Filipinas/os (such as presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino) were able to rise to power thanks to upward mobility or sustained privilege, whereas the marginalisation of working-class Chinese Filipinas/os has historically been exacerbated by anti-Communist and anti-immigrant rhetoric (Tan 1986; Anderson 1988; Hau 2014; Chu 2016).^[3] In 1975, Ferdinand Marcos took measures to facilitate Philippine-Chinese relations including establishing official bilateral relations with the People’s Republic of China (a move that paved the way for overseas contract workers from the Philippines to work in China, eventually allowing Marcos to claim a decreased unemployment rate along with overseas worker remittances) and streamlining the process of naturalisation for Chinese immigrants in the Philippines (a process that ‘penalise [d] the poorest Chinese’ [Weightman 1985: 177]).^[4] Popular films from different periods in Philippine cinema history have depicted the Chinese diasporic subject variously at the margins and centre of Philippine society. Films produced during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos often included Chinese Filipinas/os as supporting characters, liminally situated within the diegesis as a reflection of a marginalised status in society: the main antagonist in the neorealist Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975) is Ah-Tek, a sex trafficker of Chinese descent, the freewheeling comedy Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Does Your Heart Beat Faster?, 1980) includes a subplot involving the intrigue of Manila’s Chinese mafia, and the intense religious drama Himala (Miracle, 1982) prominently features a Chinese businessman as one of the protagonist’s many devotees. As Roland Tolentino has argued, such depictions of social liminality were central to the political critique that progressive filmmakers embedded in their Marcos era films (Tolentino 2012: 124-129), however, José Capino has acknowledged that the weight of social abjection placed specifically upon Chinese Filipinos in such films was met with charges of racism (Capino 2020: 36-37). Later films have emphasised the Chinese diaspora in more central ways, whether the familial drama franchise Mano Po (Hand Please, 2002-2016) focused on a Chinese-Philippine family or the uncanny horror film Feng Shui (2004), and its sequel, about the uncanny travel of Chinese artefacts and spectral forces to the Philippines. Despite the centrality of the Chinese diaspora in such popular films, M. Antonio Lizada has argued that Chinese Filipinas/os remain marginalised through their construction as liminal in contemporary Philippine cinema (Lizada 2020).

By deploying references to China via props and music, Oda sa Wala subtly engages with this history of Chinese diasporic subjects in Philippine cinema. In so doing, the film is situated within a formal and industrial category that Bliss Cua Lim calls a ‘pan-Asian cinema of allusion’ (Lim 2015), films that not only downplay their cultural and historical situatedness to appeal to a wide global market but also foreground allusive engagement with racialised cultures and histories. In this way, the film’s references to Chinese ethnicity, as well as its engagement with Duterte’s necropolitical reign in the Philippines, resonate with local, regional, and diasporic audiences, while also providing avenues for viewers who miss such references to experience the film as a deracinated fusion of dark comedy and supernatural ‘Asian’ horror. Notably, references to Chinese culture and ethnicity are utilised both in the characterisation of Sonya’s mother and transactions of the family business, as we will see. Beyond the implication that Sonya is a living corpse in relation to her mother’s ghostlike aural presence, the family business is shown to link directly to the acquisition of corpses—a key reference to the contemporaneous political moment in the Philippines.

Sonya is presented as a precarious funeral parlour worker whose survival relies on a steady influx of bodies to her family’s Langit Funeral Service. The funeral parlour business not only provides for the sustenance of Sonya and her father (Joonee Gamboa), but also the only way Sonya can pay off her family’s debt to moneylender Theodore, who has seized the deed to her and her father’s house. The precarious and competitive nature of the funeral trade is emphasised early on in the film when Sonya casts a disheartened gaze out her window, and an eyeline match reveals a funeral procession coordinated by one of Sonya’s competitors, the Alindog Funeral Home. Sonya’s entrapped state of unstable employment in a funerary profession references the history of exploitative employment conditions for women in caregiving industries both in the Philippines and the diaspora, a history also reflected cinematically in the genre of Filipina caregiver dramas such as Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo (Once a Moth, 1976), Sister Stella L. (1984), Caregiver (2008), and Lingua Franca (2019).^[5] Sonya’s dealings with corpses throughout the film, and the corpse as an economic prospect more generally, gesture to the film’s production contexts during Duterte’s authoritarian presidency. On the campaign trail for the 2016 presidential election, Duterte urged his supporters to open funeral homes in order to profit from the mass killings that he promised would result from his so-called War on Drugs. ‘If I become president, I advise you people to put up several funeral parlour businesses because I am against illegal drugs… I might kill someone because of it’ (qtd. in Santos 2015), and as he later stated, ‘The funeral parlours will be packed… I’ll supply the dead bodies’ (qtd. in France-Presse 2016). Oda sa Wala’s realist depictions of corpses in Sonya’s funeral parlour home allow for the emergence of a politically critical aesthetic by aligning with José Capino’s suggestion that the ghastly image of the corpse holds a possibility of provoking an antiauthoritarian politics (Capino 2020: 177). Further, Sonya is often constrained within the mise-en-scène, suggesting that she herself is a corpse trapped architecturally, geographically, and historically.

 

 

By utilising mise-en-scène enframement and repeated diegetic music, the opening sequence of Oda sa Wala underscores the relationship between Sonya as a living corpse and her mother as a ghostly presence indicated via a sonic motif. The film opens with a shot of insects encircling a compact fluorescent lamp. The shot is accompanied by a 1980s rendition of an old Chinese folk song, ‘Mo Li Hua / 茉莉花’ (Jasmine Flower), a solemn yet optimistic tune that begins with a basic melody composed of plucked strings and the echo-reflected ethereal voice of popular Taiwanese singer Fong Fei-fei.^[6] As vibraphones enter the aural mix, an extremely high-angle shot from the ceiling introduces the film’s protagonist, Sonya, lying on a bed in a dimly lit room. The mise-en-scène immediately suggests the association of Sonya with a corpse-like existence when the grid of the bed’s canopy enframes her in a way that resembles a mourner’s view into an open casket or glass coffin (see Fig. 1). The opening shots reveal that the Mandarin song is diegetically sourced: it exudes from Sonya’s earbuds, which are plugged into a portable cassette player that she grasps against her body. This song provides a continual aural refrain within the diegesis—sometimes played on the cassette tape, and sometimes hummed by Sonya—and the song’s transnational travel from the Chinese mainland, to Taiwan, and to Sonya in the Philippines prefigures the film’s thematics of transnationality that are otherwise visually represented within the mise-en-scène.

Sonya’s house, a setting that the director and production designers intended as a character in itself (Baltazar 2022), is a gloomy bahay na bato (a Spanish colonial-era stone house), at once depicted as a confining coffin for Sonya and as a space where diverse histories and geographies coalesce. Two rooms stand out in this regard: the dining area on the second floor and Sonya’s office on the ground floor. The dining room is frequently shown from the house’s exterior through a window, creating a dynamic set of frames within frames. In addition to the unique, rounded, squarish 4:3 aspect ratio of the entire film and the window itself, at least five framed pictures are hung behind and adjacent to the dining room table. Three of these pictures, aligned in a row below the ceiling, appear to be family photographs as suggested by their sepia tonality, their composition akin to family portraiture, and placement within the dining area. The other two frames are slightly larger, contain portrait paintings, and are positioned on adjacent walls; the portrait on the left wall appears to be a patriarch in the family, and the one on the opposite wall suggests a matriarch. The frames-within-frames composition is intersected by a row of small Catholic statues and figurines—local iterations or figures of European Catholicism—in mid-ground that extend parallel to the opposite wall.^[7] The way in which these artefacts intervene in the midground, obstructing visual access to the family portraiture, structurally mirrors the history of Spanish (and American) colonisation in the Philippines as a disruptive genocidal force to generations of Philippine families. Yet, given that no familial connections among the characters, the framed pictures, or colonial histories are explicitly indicated in Oda sa Wala, the film engages in a feminist tactic that Bakrathi Mani calls ‘nonmimetic identification’ (Mani 2020: 11). Mani’s concept encompasses representational strategies that ‘foreground material objects’ (Mani 2020: 11) rather than explicit, encyclopedic, or linear familial narratives of individual colonial subjects.

 

 

A similar curatorial and collage-based mise-en-scène is employed to obliquely construct the second female corpse within the film’s narrative, Sonya’s mother. It should first be noted that, in the scriptwriting phase, Baltazar wrote explicit, in-depth character descriptions that went far beyond what was represented in the film (Baltazar 2022). Specifically, she intended the opening Mandarin song ‘Mo Li Hua’ to express Sonya’s memory of her mother (Baltazar 2022). Throughout the film, Sonya plays or hums the song and emotes a sense of longing, loss, or nostalgia, depending on the situation. The song’s Chinese origin, the mother’s implied transnational connection with China and perhaps Japan, and the curation of props in the downstairs funeral parlour and preparation room are embedded in the song’s narrative. The desk where Sonya works is covered with numerous props, many of which can be identified as having a Chinese origin (see Figure 2). The front panel of the desk features a red and metallic-gold poster of Cai Shen, the Chinese god of wealth. The poster serves as a wish for good fortune and is commonly found in households or family businesses.^[8] This poster is particularly prescient in that Sonya’s struggle to survive takes place primarily at the desk, and the poster faces potential customers as a kind of charmed threshold across which Sonya conducts her business transactions.

The left-hand side of Sonya’s desk displays a 1930s-era poster depicting a plane flying over the Temple of Heaven in central Beijing; the poster was an advertisement for the pre-PRC commercial airline China National Aviation Corporation.^[9] This poster’s emphasis on international travel, along with some Japanese artefacts on the tabletop, suggests that, aside from an ethnic connection to China, Sonya’s mother may have had transnational employment, perhaps with an airline or as a migrant worker. The top of the table contains numerous artefacts, among them porcelain Buddhist monks practising martial arts, a Japanese Hagoita paddle adorned with a female figure, and a Japanese maneki-neko, or gesturing cat, good-luck charm. Hanging beside Sonya’s desk is a Chinese red tapestry with metallic gold characters and decorative elements. Atop the tapestry is a stylised rendition of the Chinese character Fú (福), meaning ‘good fortune.’ The character, along with others, appears in floral patterns and ancient character format throughout the tapestry, which is overall meant to convey well wishes and good fortune akin to the Cai Shen poster and other artefacts mentioned previously.^[10]

A key component of Oda sa Wala’s feminist necropoetics is the construction of a mise-en-scène and soundscape that underscores histories of transnational connections between China and the Philippines. The curation of these national signifiers forges connections between Sonya and her mother within the diegesis, and also situates the film within the broader contemporary ‘pan-Asian cinema of allusion’ (Lim 2015). In addition to these sonic and collage-based aesthetics, the film deploys cinematography and editing that engage with the tradition of global slow cinema, as we will see.

Sonya and the Corpse: Contrapuntal Aesthetics

In depicting the everyday life of the protagonist Sonya and her exhaustive and spatially constrained wait for new customers, Oda sa Wala engages the grammar of contemporary slow cinema in the mode’s preference for duration over plot-driven narrative (de Villiers 2022: 12) and its ‘evacuate[d] eventfulness, in the pursuit of dedramatised scenarios’ (Gorfinkel 2016: 124). Further, the film solicits what Emre Çağlayan identifies as components that are key to the ‘historical poetics’ (2018: 16) of slow cinema, respectively, ‘nostalgia, absurdism and boredom’ (2018: 17) by presenting Sonya’s affective states ranging among sentimental remembrance of a Chinese folk song, feelings of communicative kinship with an unknown corpse against the strictures of normative logic, and the utter ennui and distress of a state of endless debt. Yet even as she employs slow-cinema aesthetics throughout, Baltazar selectively utilises key points of divergence from those conventions to underscore significant moments of connection between Sonya and the unidentified corpse.

As part of the film’s broader development of a feminist necropoetics, Oda sa Wala contains strategic moments of visual and temporal departure from standard cinematographic and editorial conventions that the film inherits from global slow cinema. In briefly utilising close camera distance, dynamic cinematography, and rapid editing in select scenes, Baltazar employs contradiction—in this case, going against the grain of slow cinema conventions—in consonance with the feminist authorial method of ‘enact[ing] implied contradiction’ (Bronfen 1992: 404). Elisabeth Bronfen observed such utilisations of contradiction as a commonality among twentieth-century women writers’ approaches to cultural conflations of death and womanhood. Specific to the film medium, this contrapuntal tactic recalls Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s oppositional strategy of ‘playing with fire’ (Shimizu 2005: 322), a refashioning of forms of cultural production that have traditionally disenfranchised people of colour (such as narrative filmmaking) in order to create a mode of critical feminist filmmaking. In Oda sa Wala, Baltazar constructs an aesthetic framework that draws on the recognisable traits of global slow cinema, but she diverges from it at key points, contrapuntally highlighting the importance of certain sequences to the film’s process of meaning-making.

The film’s incorporation of close camera distance and dynamic cinematography is initiated by the arrival of the unidentified female corpse at Sonya’s funeral parlour. Close-up framings and camera movements act contrapuntally, diverging from the film’s broader slow cinema aesthetics of long shots from a locked-down camera. Narratively, these techniques punctuate Sonya’s drastic life changes as she begins to incorporate the corpse into her daily life. The transformative contact between the corpse and Sonya is formally represented through a close shot and an ethereal mobile camera, while also narratively reflected in the increased flow of capital into Sonya’s workplace (a magical transformation that Sonya attributes to the corpse).

 

 

 

 

The first sequence in Oda sa Wala, which introduces camera movement, serves as a montage between the scene of the corpse’s arrival and Sonya’s slow trickle of new customers. The female corpse arrives in a gory state (Fig. 3). Red blood has collected on her left eyebrow and in a stream from her right nostril to the bottom of her cheek; spatters of discoloured and caked blood or dirt cover her dress, muting the fabric’s original light colour and green pattern, which included embroidered greenery around the collar. A medium close-up of the horizontal corpse (Fig. 3) emphasises the visual juxtaposition of these two opposite colour schemes—the red and brown gore with the discoloured off-white and green decorated fabric—and then collides with a close-up of browned and blackened meat (Fig. 4) that smokes in a frying pan. The collision of these shots of human and animal flesh that Sonya prepares to eat serves as a graphic match, demonstrating the essential nature of both to Sonya’s survival: the former a source of magical financial nourishment and the latter a form of nutritional sustenance. A low-angle medium shot of Sonya staring at the cooking meat zooms to a close-up while Sonya begins biting her nails (Fig. 5), an activity that is repeated throughout the film to emphasise the stress of Sonya’s precarity.^[11]

The continuity of that stress carries over to the next shot of Sonya at her desk, tuning a radio dial as she rests her head on her arm, then drumming her fingers against the tabletop. This shot is one instance of a larger motif in the film, specifically, depictions of Sonya in states of boredom, waiting, exhaustion, and inactive anxiety, or what Mary Ann Doane calls ‘dead time’—time in which nothing happens, time which is in some sense ‘wasted’, expended without product’ (Doane 2002: 160). Sonya’s exhaustion parallels the static cinematography, a stasis that is also attributed to Sonya up to this point in her physical and financial imprisonment within a situation of interminable debt. Yet the subtle vitality of the background curtains rippling in the breeze gives way to the film’s first utilisation of a mobile camera. Sonya stands, passes through the curtains, and walks into the corpse preparation room. The camera then tracks right past the curtains, slowly following Sonya’s trajectory as we find her pouring a drink, then sitting beside the unidentified corpse’s resting slab. The tracking shot and a slight adjustment pan are quite noticeable and unsettling, given that the camera has been completely locked down until this point. The slowness of the track and subtleness of the pan suggest the presence of an apparition gradually haunting Sonya. A cut from this full view of the preparation room to a close-up of Sonya’s face emphasises her introspection, lubricated by a dark beverage, perhaps tea or coffee.

A similar, yet even more mobile, camera movement is employed soon after, following the arrival of new customers later that night. As Sonya locks up the outer gate and door to the funeral home, the camera dollies back to follow her trek to her desk. Once she sits, the camera dollies around to the front of the desk, panning and rotating so that Sonya remains within the frame. Sonya transfers money she presumably made that day from new customers between containers, then walks back to visit and speak with the corpse, while the camera dollies in through the curtains once again.

Distance and proximity form a key contrapuntal aesthetic employed in this dynamic sequence following the corpse’s arrival. Most of the film is shot with a wide-angle lens from a considerable distance, settling on full or long shots for much of its duration. Cinematographer Neil Daza explained that this was not only a preference of director Dwein Baltazar, ‘Dwein usually does long takes on a wide shot with minimal close-ups or none at all’ (Daza 2019), but also long shots were Daza’s solution to the rounded-squarish 4:3 aspect ratio that significantly constrained the mise-en-scène, ‘Composing on a 4:3 aspect ratio requires reorientation on how you shoot and block actors. It’s harder to do over-the-shoulder shots and you need to pull back a lot from your main subject to get a well-composed shot… I wanted a consistent depth of field and one angle of view throughout the film, creating a single point of view’ (Daza 2019). In the present sequence, though, there are three close-ups of women’s faces that diverge from the longer shot distance pattern of the bulk of the film. These close-ups consist of a horizontal shot of the corpse’s face (Fig. 3), a low-angle zoom to Sonya’s face (Fig. 5), and a shot of Sonya’s face as she rests against the mortuary slab. As Mary Ann Doane has argued, close-ups simultaneously convey character depth (2003: 90-94) while also diminishing visual expansiveness via their ‘annihilation of a sense of depth’ (2003: 91). In Oda sa Wala, the contrapuntal use of the close-up plunges the viewer into intimate connection with both the corpse and Sonya, emphasising Sonya’s precarity and the corpse’s vulnerability and suggesting that the two are linked via a living-death subjectivity drawn out by the close shot distance.

In addition to shot distance, dynamic camera movement is employed in this sequence as a counterpoint to the film’s pervasive static cinematography, and the juxtaposition of movement with stasis ultimately suggests that the arrival of the corpse brings financial and material energy to Sonya’s existence. The previously discussed first tracking shot that moves through the curtains behind Sonya’s desk to the corpse preparation room echoes in microcosm the topic of transnational movement referenced in the ‘See China by Sea’ poster on the desk. The slow pacing of the camera’s tracking offers an implicit uncanny presence, perhaps the spirit of Sonya’s mother or the spirit of the female corpse, and this arrival of a spectral force is reiterated by the corpse’s startling spasm described in the opening of this article. Yet this undead presence, emphasised by the mobile camera, provides not only an affective, felt dimension of the uncanny but also firmly indicates how the lack of access to capital is central to the death-dealing practices inherent in necropolitics. Just as the corpse introduces a source of solidarity and identification that enlivens Sonya’s life, so too the corpse mysteriously provides an influx of capital—produced by the procession of dead bodies that follow her—that (re)animates Sonya’s business and gives her the hope that she will be able to pay off Theodore.^[12]

 

 

 

Perhaps the most iconic use of a mobile camera in the film is at Sonya’s birthday party. The scene is an affective high point in the film’s narrative as it seems that, given the sudden boom in her business, Sonya may be able to repay her debt. After cutting her cake at the dining room table and serving a slice to herself, her father, and the unidentified corpse, Sonya excuses herself to turn on ‘Mo Li Hua’ on an audio cassette player in the adjacent room. As she breezes through a set of sheer curtains into the room, the camera begins a minimally noticeable pan right, then left, following her approach to the cassette player. Sonya reenters the dining room with a wide smile on her face as she begins to dance. She pivots back and forth to the tune, spins, and then incorporates her outstretched hands into the back-and-forth oscillation as she beckons her father to join her. As Sonya dances towards the dining table, the camera tracks left, keeping her centred within a tight medium shot, then shifts to a loose medium shot (Fig. 6).

Yet, as in the other sporadic contrapuntal segments with mobile cinematography and close camera distance, the style quickly reverts to the standard long-shot distance and fixed camera position. In this case, a long shot from outside the dining room window (Fig. 7) once again reflects the static socio-economic positioning of Sonya and her family by spatially confining Sonya, her father, and the corpse within the constrained space of the window frame—a vertical rectangle resembling the shape of the makeshift board that the corpse is tied upright to. Further emphasising the living-death connection with Sonya, the corpse is often positioned upright either in a seated position, akin to Sonya at the desk, or strapped to the vertical makeshift gurney, which Sonya at one point dances with (Fig. 7). This formal decision not only emphasises the characters’ connection, but also foreshadows the corpse’s reanimation and more broadly suggests the film’s citation of an indigenous funerary tradition.^[13]

In her immobile precarity, Sonya is haunted by the collusions of capital, colonialism, and authoritarianism that have historically designated the poor and downwardly mobile populations as those whose death is financially lucrative and empowering to the authoritarian upper class and neocolonial powers alike. Neferti Tadiar has argued that the forms of punitive violence—which can be traced from Duterte’s war on drugs, through Ferdinand Marcos’ extrajudicial killings and disappearances of dissenters, into American and Spanish colonial genocides in the Philippines—simultaneously punish and produce social categories marked for control and potential death whether they be women, the socioeconomically disenfranchised, or unassimilable indigenous peoples (Tadiar 2022: 244). Yet in critical response, politically engaged artists have implemented oppositional forms to work against the grain of death-designating propaganda, ‘repeating and reversing them or spinning them in other directions’ (Tadiar 2022: 263). By incorporating close-up framings and mobile cinematography, Oda sa Wala utilises contrapuntal forms of feminist necropoetics that place Sonya and the corpse in intimate proximity, drawing connections across time and suggesting continuities across generations. Such techniques are expanded in the final scene, generating a morbid collectivity of multiple subjects in movement and transformation, including Sonya, the corpse, and Sonya’s mother.

Morbid Collectivity and Transverse Historiography

By engaging tactics of feminist necropoetics, Oda sa Wala places Sonya, her mother, the corpse, and the viewer into a form of morbid collectivity, a formation of solidarity in which togetherness operates across the life/death distinction despite social strictures that discourage morbid interests in the non-living. This capacious form of collectivity suggests a radical adaptation of the theory of coalition-in-difference forged out of women of colour feminism (Smith and Smith 1981: 126). Rather than a negative affect or orientation, here morbidity acts as a form of relation that produces mutual recognition between the social abject (minoritarian subject) and the biopolitical abject (the corpse). Baltazar’s cultivation of a morbid amalgamation of relational bodies is in aesthetic conversation with methods of political critique initiated by past politicised auteurs of Philippine cinema. For example, Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal constructed mise-en-scènes that focalised ‘a collective sea of bodies’ (Tolentino 2012: 122) and an ‘abject populace’ (Tolentino 2012: 124-128), respectively, as a form of political dissent under the Marcos dictatorship. Baltazar’s contribution is to place the nonliving body in relation to the gendered living body, a move that allegorically suggests how historical consciousness might be built across generations of anti-authoritarian political memory. In addition, as a film, Oda sa Wala provides avenues for viewers to engage with the imagery of the corpse and the film’s propositions of morbid collectivity. Indeed, as Patricia MacCormack has insightfully observed, film—as a nonhuman thing with an indexical relation to bodies—operates like a corpse in its ability to prompt material and imagined relations with bodies both alive and dead, ‘films, like bodies, offer uses and activities with the flesh unavailable in the “real” world with “real” bodies’ (MacCormack 2008: 360).

The contrapuntal engagement with rapid editing and camera movement culminates in the film’s concluding sequence to demonstrate the final morbid collectivity among Sonya (a living corpse, as suggested by Baltazar [2022]), her mother (as an aural refrain), and the corpse (inexplicably reanimated at the end). Theodore arrives at the funeral parlour, upset by both Sonya’s lack of payment and the newly pungent smell of decay—an odour that is apparently only noticeable to Theodore, once again emphasising Sonya’s connection to the corpse. After beating Sonya, Theodore ultimately evicts her and her father from their house. The two pack up their belongings in a white hearse and start driving down a two-lane road, but eventually the hearse stalls beside a forest. In a medium profile shot, Sonya rests her back against the passenger door while her father works on the car. As dusk approaches, she smokes a cigarette to the screeching and clicking chorus of forest insects. Something catches Sonya’s eye in the forest, and she stands up from her relaxed pose against the hearse. Nondiegetic synth bells ease into the insect soundscape as a pan to the left reveals a nude old woman (the reanimated corpse) in the distance, walking deeper into the forest. Sonya heads off in pursuit of the woman, and the nondiegetic song phases into a feminine vocal arrangement, deconstructed into a rendition of ‘Mo Li Hua.’ In a medium shot, Sonya stumbles into a moonlit clearing as the nondiegetic song transitions to a synth lead, prompting a more optimistic tone to counter the mysterious aura established earlier. While low-key lighting typically evokes a sense of dread in the viewer, here it is contextualised with music, a narrative drive toward the suspension of disbelief, Subong’s expressive performance of wonder, and, specifically, the look of hopeful eagerness in her eyes that suggests the prospect of a felicitous reunion with the female corpse. The mild illumination that replicates natural moonlight, the optimistic synth, and Sonya’s look of excited anticipation for finding her living dead companion all work in concert to make this a particularly sanguine sequence.

 

 

The film concludes with nine extremely rapid jump cuts that divide eight two-second medium close-ups of Sonya as she looks back and forth in the clearing for her corpse companion. Akin to the contrapuntal techniques discussed previously, these jump cuts diverge from the film’s broader pattern of long takes, thereby formally emphasising the scene’s significance. The camera tracks left, encircling Sonya, as the jump cuts progress and culminate in a final thirty second shot that settles on a close-up of Sonya in which the out of focus silhouette of the living dead woman appears over Sonya’s shoulder (Fig. 8). Just as Sonya begins to turn to face the woman, the film cuts to the credits sequence accompanied by Fong Fei-fei’s rendition of ‘Mo Li Hua.’ The Mandarin song once again stands in as the aural apparition of Sonya’s mother, so that the film’s concluding sound and image mix brings together Sonya, the unidentified corpse, and Sonya’s mother in a final enactment of morbid collectivity.

Oda sa Wala’s sonic, curatorial, and contrapuntal aesthetics culminate in a feminist necropoetics that countered the circulation of corpse imagery as a method of intimidation deployed by the Duterte regime and its cultural actors. More broadly, feminist necropoetics provides a crucial example of how cadaverous sensibilities and imagery might be summoned toward collective, critical, antipatriarchal, and antiauthoritarian purposes. Thus, as an avenue of political aesthetics, feminist necropoetics has potential applications to feminist media production outside of the Philippines. By drawing diegetic connections among three women whose lives span three generations of necropolitical hegemony in the Philippines—specifically, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1986, the corrupt presidencies of Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo spanning 1998 to 2010, and the authoritarian reign of Rodrigo Duterte contemporary to the film’s production—Oda sa Wala prompts a transversal consideration of history that underscores connections among death dealing practices across historical periods.^[14] In doing so, the film is conversant with past Philippine cinematic traditions in which women allegorically represented the nation’s plight under conditions of neocolonialism and globalisation (Tan 2010; Tolentino 2010). Formal strategies of sound, curation, and counterpoint work in tandem to bring together Sonya, her mother, and the unnamed corpse into a cross-generational collective of women at the margins of Philippine socio-economic history.

Notes

[1] ‘Necropolitics’ is Achille Mbembe’s (2003) term for the structures of killing deployed by modern governments and rulers, which underwrite ‘biopolitics’, Foucault’s term for modern governments’ designation of certain privileged populations as lives to be fostered. This concept has been adapted to the Philippine context by scholars such as Bobby Benedicto (2015). The film’s production during Duterte’s presidency is briefly mentioned in the Blu-ray liner notes (Gonzaga 2022: 19).

[2] ‘Necropoetics’ has previously been invoked to describe how elegiac texts serve necropolitical purposes (Perry 2022: 19). Here, I argue that representations of the dead are not necessarily politically bankrupt, and I instead conjure necropoetics to investigate feminist depictions of the corpse.

[3] For the most extensive consideration of this subject, see Caroline S. Hau’s recent book The Chinese Question (2014).

[4] Diplomatic relations between the two countries were officially established with the signing of the ‘Joint Communique of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines’ on June 9, 1975. Marcos streamlined naturalisation for wealthy Chinese immigrants with ‘Letter of Instruction’ No. 270, dated April 11, 1975.

[5] Whereas in the United States, mortuary professions have historically been associated with menUnlike the masculine gendering of mortuary professions in countries like the United States (Donley 2019), in the Philippines, it is not uncommon for women to seek employment in mortuary professions, in particular due to its potential as a prospect for overseas employment (Dagooc 2008). Thus, the history of women embalmers and mortuary workers in the Philippines is part of a broader history of women in caregiving industries connected to the historical emergence of the so-called ‘Overseas Filipino Worker,’ solidified into policy by the Marcos regime in the 1970s, but that can be traced back to compulsive migration under conditions of American colonial subjugation.

[6] This association of a very old Mandarin song with defunct technologies and the protagonist’s nostalgia is reminiscent of how Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang utilises classic Mandarin music to solicit nostalgia and mediate the past (de Villiers 2022: 19).

[7] The set of Catholic artefacts includes small statues of the Virgin Mary, Saint Cecilia, and Señor Santo Niño de Cebú, along with votive candles and a cherubic figurine clad in gold armour.

[8] I thank my colleague, Professor Hong Zhou, for this detail about the popularity of Cai Shen posters.

[9] The poster, dating to the 1930s, appears on a website dedicated to artefacts from the China National Aviation Corporation (‘Miscellaneous Items’ 2001).

[10] Once again, I thank Professor Zhou for the additional details on this tapestry’s ancient lettering.

[11] Juliana Chang has interpreted nail biting in Philippine diasporic literature as part of an array of culturally disreputable behaviours associated with pathologised femininity, a ‘repressed violence’ (Chang 2003: 645) diffused toward the self as a refusal of patriarchal hegemonies. Thus, Sonya’s nail-biting behaviour could also be understood as a microcosm of her contradictory ‘living-dead’ status, an expression of refusal (zombie-like flat affect) despite her entrapment within lived conditions of dependency in an authoritarian patriarchal context.

[12] Jeffrey Jeturian’s films are another example of Philippine cinema where death and capital are diegetically linked (Lim 2011).

[13] According to Baltazar (2021), one of the inspirations for the film was a photograph she saw as a child of a Mountain Province tradition in which a dead body was seated at a dinner table. In the film, the corpse is often seated upright and not embalmed until reaching a state of decomposition. Perhaps these details were references to the Bontoc mortuary practice of seating a—traditionally not embalmed—corpse in a sangachil or death chair (Salvador-Amores 2018).

[14] Neferti Tadiar has recently outlined the continuities among extrajudicial killings in the Philippines from the colonial era to the contemporary moment that are all carried out under the ideological rubric of ‘just war’ (Tadiar 2022: 229-232)