If you’ve ever wanted to watch a haunted-house movie where the house has more emotional range than half the cast and the demon has better hair than most of the humans, Kuwaresma is here for you. Whether you should be here for it is another matter.
Marketed as a prestige Filipino supernatural horror film, directed by Erik Matti and front-loaded with heavyweight stars Sharon Cuneta and John Arcilla, Kuwaresma promises a slow-burn family nightmare set in 1980s Baguio. What it actually delivers is a gorgeous, overcooked melodrama wrapped in digital smoke and jump scares, all orbiting a story that constantly hints it has something profound to say—but keeps getting distracted by its own VFX reel.
Lent, But It Feels Like Penance
Set during Lent (thus the title), the film follows Luis Fajardo, who returns to his family’s house in Baguio to mourn his twin sister Manuela’s death. The house is chilly, his parents—Rebecca (Sharon Cuneta) and Arturo (John Arcilla)—are even chillier, and nobody wants to talk about what actually happened to Manuela. Red flag number one: if your family home looks like an antique store married a mausoleum, don’t stay the night.
Luis starts poking around, as horror protagonists must. The more he digs, the more he uncovers secrets, lies, and the general sense that nothing in this house has seen a therapist since 1944. There’s a psychic who shows up early on to warn him, because every haunted story needs a random stranger to whisper, “Leave,” and then promptly exit the film. There are flashbacks, possessions, and a demon who looks like it stumbled in from a different, much louder movie.
It’s all almost compelling. Almost. Kuwaresma is the cinematic equivalent of someone telling a ghost story but getting lost in side tangents about the curtains, the weather, and what everyone was wearing.
Prestige Casting, Soap Opera Material
Let’s get this out of the way: Sharon Cuneta and John Arcilla are absurdly overqualified for what they’re given. These two could make watching paint dry look emotionally layered; instead they’re trapped in a script that gives them Big Emotions and Thin Motivations.
Cuneta’s Rebecca is framed as the passive matriarch, later revealed to be… less passive than advertised. She spends much of the film hovering between tragic, unkempt, and suspiciously composed for a woman living inside a demonic war zone. There are moments where Cuneta almost breaks through the noise and gives you a glimpse of what this movie could’vebeen: a horror story about a mother crushed under patriarchy, religion, and guilt. But just when it gets interesting, the film cuts away to more spooky corridor walking and yet another shot of Luis looking confused in a sweater.
Arcilla’s Arturo is the strict patriarch with a Secret, which might be compelling if the film didn’t telegraph “this man is problematic” from his first grimace. He’s essentially a walking red flag with a baritone voice. Arcilla gamely leans into the menace, but the script doesn’t trust subtlety; by the time the truth comes out, you don’t feel shocked so much as relieved the story finally caught up with what his eyebrows have been screaming since act one.
Kent and Pam Gonzales as the twins Luis and Manuela add a layer of uncanny visual symmetry—which is neat, in a “Shining twins but separated” way—but the writing leans on them as symbols more than people. They’re less siblings and more emotional props in a tragic family diorama.
Gothic House, Haunted Storytelling
Production-wise, Kuwaresma is not phoning it in. Baguio looks fantastic: misty, chilly, with that specific melancholy that comes from 80s period details and Catholic guilt. The Fajardo house is a character all on its own—“beautiful, scarred, elegant yet mysterious, welcoming yet somber,” as the production notes say—and that part, at least, shows up on screen. The art department clearly did the homework, jumping across decades with costumes and set dressing.
The problem is that the house feels more coherently designed than the storytelling. The film jumps through multiple time periods (1944, 1955, 1965, 1977, 1985), sprinkles in religious and folk imagery, and layers in family trauma, national history, and spiritual themes—but it never really threads them together. It’s all flavor, no recipe. You get individual scenes that are atmospheric and creepy, but as a whole, the narrative feels like a collage: lots of pieces, not much structure.
It wants to be a generational curse story. It wants to be about parental abuse, faith, and hypocrisy. It also wants to be a demon movie. All valid goals. Unfortunately, it tries to be all of them at once without deciding which one it actually cares about.
Demon by Design Committee
The demon in Kuwaresma should be terrifying. On paper, it’s a human in a silicone and latex suit, digitally enhanced with extra textures, horns, and hair. In practice, it often looks like a rejected boss monster from a mid-budget video game. Not terrible, exactly—just weirdly out of sync with the somber tone the film keeps insisting it has.
The more you see of the demon, the less scary it becomes. Horror 101: show less, imply more. Kuwaresma nods politely to that rule and then shoves the creature into your face under harsh lighting. By the third or fourth appearance, the demon feels less like an unknowable force of evil and more like an overexcited cosplayer trying really hard to get noticed in the background of a con photo.
Every time the film leans into practical, grounded dread—shadows in the house, strange behavior, whispered suspicions—it works. Then the demon arrives with its enhanced horns and hair and drags the tone into camp without the decency to admit it’s being camp.
Jump Scares and Emotional Whiplash
Kuwaresma also suffers from that modern horror disease: the belief that loud equals scary. Doors slam. Things shriek. Faces distort. The soundtrack ramps up as if it’s being paid per decibel. Meanwhile, the genuinely disturbing stuff—familial manipulation, isolation, gaslighting—sits there quietly, underdeveloped.
Luis’s return home and his grief for his twin should be the emotional anchor of the film. Instead, his character is often reduced to “walk around hallways, look haunted, ask questions, get vague answers, repeat.” When the film finally decides to explain what happened, it does so in a rush of exposition that feels less like a revelation and more like someone speed-reading the back half of the script.
There are a few chilling sequences: moments where Sharon Cuneta leans into full emotional breakdown, or where the house itself seems to close in. But they’re isolated islands in an ocean of “Gotcha!” moments that you can see coming several Hail Marys away.
Lent as a Metaphor (You, the Viewer, Are Fasting From Coherent Plot)
You can see what Matti is reaching for: Lent as a time of sacrifice, penitence, reflection—and here, a family paying for sins that stretch back decades. That’s rich thematic soil. Unfortunately, the movie plants about twelve different ideas in it and then forgets to water any of them long enough for them to grow.
The religious imagery, the era (1985, with all the baggage that implies in the Philippines), the oppressive parental dynamics, the psychic warning, the demon in the house—they’re all good ingredients. But together, they feel like several drafts of a script got shuffled and nobody had time (or the heart) to cut anything. The result is spiritually ambitious and dramatically over-seasoned.
Watching Kuwaresma feels a bit like Lent itself: long, heavy, and full of reminders that suffering is apparently good for you, though you’re not entirely sure what you’re supposed to be learning from it.
Final Verdict: Great Cast, Gorgeous Shell, Hollow Haunting
At the end of the day, Kuwaresma is one of those films you wish you could like more than you actually do. It has all the surface trappings of a great horror movie: powerhouse actors, a striking setting, carefully crafted production design, and a director who clearly cares about mood.
But mood without momentum quickly turns into tedium. And horror without a clear emotional throughline becomes a series of spooky vignettes stapled to family drama.
If you’re a die-hard fan of Sharon Cuneta or John Arcilla, or you’re curious about Filipino horror cinema, it’s worth a watch just to see the ambition on display. But go in knowing you’re getting less “tight, terrifying ghost story” and more “beautifully shot exorcism of a half-finished script.”
In other words: it’s called Lent. You’re supposed to feel like you’ve given something up. Here, unfortunately, it’s your time.
