arking Lav Diaz’s return to Venice four years and two features after winning the Golden Lion for the nearly four-hour , has invited easy jokes about its relative brevity by Diaz standards, clocking in as it does at a relatively efficient 156 minutes—even though it is, in fact, a nearly fivefold expansion of the 36-minute , Diaz’s contribution to the 2018 omnibus film (), which also featured episodes from Brillante Mendoza and Kidlat Tahimik. This shift in scale has also elicited a shift away from the pointed political critique that has featured in much of Diaz’s recent work: last year’s has acquired even greater cultural currency in light of the COVID-19 crisis, with its speculative-future concept of a fascist government (a barely veiled depiction of the Duterte regime) that capitalizes on a deadly pandemic to enact mass’s most pertinent and proximate point of comparison in Diaz’s recent filmography is likely (2014)—not only due to its remote setting and sense of simmering, barely repressed violence, but also in the way its very title locates the horrors of the present in the inheritance of the past.
