Sanzaru

Evelyn, a Filipina nurse, moves to Texas to take care of Dena, who is suffering from dementia. Evelyn’s cousin, Amos, and Dena’s son, Clem, also move into the apartment. And as befits any decent haunted-house story, mysterious apparitions, ghosts, and voices from out of nowhere attest to a tragedy that took place years earlier. But debut director Xia Magnus doesn’t follow the beaten path of genre cinema. He has admitted that he was inspired equally by Asian horror movies and by the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and that the atmosphere of horror—fantastically accentuated by the cinematography of Mark Khalife—serves to ask important questions about the spiritual condition of human beings, about reactions to traumatic events, and even about cultural differences between East and West. For me it was all about the way secrets keep people apart, lack of communication, and how all that messy stuff comes to the fore when people are confronted with death, said Magnus.