The Family That Slays Together, Stays Confusing Forever
Every so often, a movie comes along that’s so ambitious it forgets to be coherent. Mallari, Roderick Cabrido’s time-hopping horror epic starring Piolo Pascual as three different people across three centuries, wants to be The Exorcist, Inception, and a family reunion gone to hell—all at once. What it ends up being is a lavish, beautifully shot fever dream that collapses under the weight of its own ancestral baggage.
It’s a film about curses, manananggals, werewolves, time travel, psychic chickens (yes, psychic chickens), and generational trauma—all filtered through the lens of prestige horror. If that sentence gave you whiplash, congratulations: you’ve just experienced what it feels like to watch Mallari.
The Premise: A Family Tree That Needs Exorcising
The movie jumps between three timelines like it’s late for all of them.
First, we meet Juan Severino Mallari (Piolo Pascual), a 19th-century priest who accidentally becomes a serial killer while trying to save his mother, who’s been turned into a manananggal. It’s the classic priest’s dilemma: save mom, or save your soul? Naturally, he chooses the path of murder and entrails. Because love means never having to say, “I’ll stop feeding you people.”
Next, we cut to 1948, where Johnrey Mallari, his descendant and part-time war journalist, investigates some local murders while dabbling in time travel and possession. He gets advice from ghosts, watches a man turn into a werewolf, and decides the best way to solve the problem is to swallow a demon chicken and ask his wife to bury him alive. Because apparently, in this family, therapy is not an option.
Finally, in 2023, we meet Jonathan Mallari, a modern doctor who’s clearly skipped all his family’s warning signs and moved right back into the ancestral house. He’s haunted by visions, cursed bloodlines, and his fiancée Agnes (Janella Salvador), who somehow finds herself stabbed, possessed, and dating a guy with a recurring poultry-related curse.
Piolo Pascual: The Holy Trinity of Confusion
Let’s be clear — Piolo Pascual gives it his all. He plays a priest, a journalist, and a doctor, all named Mallari, all equally haunted, all inexplicably ripped. The man emotes like his life depends on it — he cries, he bleeds, he glares dramatically into candlelight. If overacting were an Olympic sport, Piolo would bring home the gold, silver, and bronze for this one.
But the problem isn’t him — it’s that the film never stops to explain why these characters exist in the same cursed bloodline, or how time travel became part of their theological family drama. Instead, we’re just supposed to accept that the same face has been cursed for 200 years. Which, in fairness, might explain his skincare routine.
The Plot: A Cosmic Soup of Horror Tropes
Watching Mallari is like ordering everything on the horror menu and discovering it all came in one bowl.
We’ve got:
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Colonial-era religious guilt
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Manananggals and aswangs
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Occult rituals involving chickens
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A time-traveling priest
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A psychic blanket
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A priest’s mom who turns into a demon and still nags him
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A ghost documentary
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A werewolf transformation mid-rebellion
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A cursed family heirloom that refuses to die
By the time we reach the 2020s timeline, it feels less like horror and more like a chaotic family group chat where everyone’s possessed and no one’s listening.
The script tries to weave all these threads together into a grand statement about sin, faith, and fate — but what we get is a cinematic tangle. The narrative hops between eras so often it feels like your remote control got stuck on “skip intro.”
And the final act? It’s like the writers realized they still had thirty plotlines unresolved and decided to cram them into one last supernatural brawl. There’s screaming, stabbing, decapitation, demonic possession, reincarnation, and of course — the world’s most cursed chicken cameo.
The Tone: High Gothic Meets Telenovela Meltdown
To its credit, Mallari looks stunning. The production design is lush, the score is dramatic, and the cinematography would make Guillermo del Toro shed a single holy tear. Every candlelit frame glows like a Baroque painting, and the historical costumes could win awards — which, to be fair, they did.
But emotionally? It’s chaos.
One moment, we’re in a solemn confessional about faith and guilt. The next, we’re watching Piolo wrestle a werewolf or whisper to a floating fetus. The dialogue veers between Shakespearean tragedy and soap opera melodrama. Someone is always shouting “Nooo!” or “Forgive me, Father!” or “Eat the chick, it’s the only way!”
It’s like the script was co-written by a theologian, a horror fan, and a telenovela writer locked in a room with too much Red Bull.
The Horror: Jump Scares by Way of Existential Exhaustion
Mallari wants to be terrifying — and occasionally, it is. The early scenes with the manananggal mother are creepy in a folkloric, tragic way. The historical sections have a gothic intensity that works well.
But every time the tension builds, the film undercuts itself with either another timeline jump or an unintentionally hilarious twist. Nothing kills the mood faster than a solemn priest scene followed by someone yelling, “Quick! The chick is inside him!”
The CGI doesn’t help either. Some of the supernatural effects look decent; others look like they wandered in from a 2004 PlayStation cutscene. And while the gore is plentiful, it’s so inconsistent in tone that it stops being horrifying and starts being weirdly comedic — like a demonic cooking show gone wrong.
The Symbolism: When the Chick Represents Everything and Nothing
There’s clearly something going on here about faith, generational sin, and the weight of colonial Catholicism. But the message gets buried under layers of overcooked symbolism.
The “black chick” that passes from one generation to the next is supposed to represent the family’s curse, but by the third act, it feels more like a running gag than a theological metaphor. Every time someone swallows it, you half-expect a voice-over to say, “This episode of Fear Factor was sponsored by Satan.”
Even the film’s climactic moral — that no one escapes the sins of their ancestors — gets lost in all the cross-cutting chaos. By the end, you’re not sure if the Mallaris are cursed, blessed, or just victims of bad screenwriting.
The Ending: Congratulations, You’re All Doomed
After 130 minutes of madness, the film closes with Jonathan and his now-demonic fiancée Agnes settling down in the ancestral home, bickering like a possessed couple on a cooking show. “You turned me into a monster!” she snaps. “You’ll be hungry during the full moon,” he replies.
It’s supposed to be chilling. It’s not. It’s sitcom material. You half expect the camera to pan out while a laugh track plays.
And that’s the thing — after so many twists, reincarnations, and poultry-based possessions, you just stop caring. It’s not horror anymore; it’s cosmic fatigue.
The Final Verdict: Ambition Is a Hell of a Drug
Mallari deserves points for ambition. It’s visually striking, thematically ambitious, and Piolo Pascual throws himself into the madness like a man possessed (literally, three times). But ambition alone can’t save it from its own bloated storytelling.
It’s a film that tries to be profound but ends up being a supernatural soap opera with better lighting. It’s not scary, not cohesive, and not nearly as deep as it thinks it is. But my God — it’s never boring.
If you like your horror messy, melodramatic, and full of cursed poultry, Mallari might just be your new guilty pleasure.
Rating: 4/10 — Beautiful, baffling, and proof that sometimes the scariest thing in a horror movie is the plot summary.
