Two young women starts their day early preparing for work, heading out to a fish market in Athens. Teresa (Hasmine Kilip) wears a short skirt, which her older sister Emy (Abigael Loma) scolds her for. They go to a shop owned by another Filipino lady, frantic and reliant on Teresa. Emy, presumed to be there because of her sister’s referral, is absent minded. Later Teresa hooks up with another employee Argyris (Mihalis Siriopoulos) in the supply room, while a customer asks if the story is open. Emy hesitates but later responds in Greek, yes. She then ruins the fish she is supposed to slice and starts bleeding, at first suggested from the nose. Later while Teresa helps her clean up, both are pretty calm about the blood coming out of Emy’s tear ducts.
This opening is significant in that it shows one of the few moments in the film where both of them are actually working, or at least trying to. One would think that Emy was undocumented, or newly arrived, or both. But this seems to be not the case. The aural binary between the sisters, which will be elaborated further, is set; Teresa is outgoing and street smart, while Emy is not. The elements of speculation and suggestion dominates the entirety of Araceli Lemos debut Holy Emy (2021), a composite of Filipino migrants’ episodes in Greece, opposing paths of coming of age of two sisters, overall told with understated body horror. The film’s ambition may justify its approach, but ultimately it is also its greatest burden.
The next day, Teresa prepares for church and asserts that Emy can’t come. Wait, I thought, so maybe she is undocumented after all, since she can’t even show up in a small closely knit Filipino church. The real reason is much more perplexing. Emy shows up anyway, alarming Teresa in the middle of the service. Linda (Angeli Bayani), a pious looking aunt-figure, talks to them and explains to Emy she can’t join mass because she is still unbaptised. After the service ends, an elderly Greek woman, Mrs. Cristina (Eirini Inglesi), recognizing Emy approaches her and offers her work in her house, a job formerly held by her mother. Linda immediately intercepts and tells Cristina is not welcome here. Emy is told to not even consider it as her house is ‘full of sin’. The three of them proceed to a community hall of the church for a group debutante party, Teresa is one of the girls who turns 18. Every time Teresa addresses Emy as ‘ate’, it is not being translated as ‘big sister’ in the subtitles. The dynamic between the sisters is off putting especially whenever Teresa’s maturity is contrasted to Emy’s stubbornness, who is in fact a few years older.
Linda turns out to be a caretaker of sorts to the girls as their mother is in the Philippines. They live in the same building, but their mother in a video call, reminds Teresa firmly to keep Emy away from Linda. A very odd set up. One that is never fully explained how it came to be. To shut down completely Emy’s interest in working for Cristina, Linda revealed that Cristina took advantage of their mother, who she labels a mangkukulam, translated in the subtitles as witch doctor. Based on how religious Linda is, we can assume that is exactly what she meant. My first guess as Cristina’s house as some sort of brothel with Filipina or other migrant sex workers is now out of the question. Almost the entire first third of the film is made up of these fragmented scenes, building up on migrant experiences, but taking them in other more bizarre directions.
The pacing greatly improves when Teresa discovers she is pregnant, while Emy pursues the job offer of Cristina. When the pregnancy was announced to their mother, she casually says Teresa doesn’t have to get married, or even go after Argyris. Sneaking out one day, Emy goes on a tour of the house where she will work as an overall caregiver for Mrs. Cristina. She sees her mother’s former living quarters, while Cristina narrates their relationship, both personal and professional. Emy meets Luis (Ku Aquino), Cristina’s Filipino partner and well, resident healer, a more fitting translation than witch doctor. Emy witnesses an ‘procedure’ where Luis rubs a patient’s stomach, his fingers eventually covered in blood as he pulls out small organ-like material causing ailment to the person. This is a very uncanny scene of a phenomenon usually given the tabloid treatment in the Philippines. Other stories mention faith healers pulling out stones, nails, or glass shards from bodies without cutting their flesh. But those of course would stray too far from the film’s theme.
Emy is ready to embrace this. Soon, she becomes Cristina’s star employee, attracting affluent patrons seeking treatment for otherwise hopeless medical conditions, and being celebrated for her skills and who she is. The validation feels amazing, Emy takes a breather from being infantilized by Teresa, Linda, or her absent mother, all preoccupied with other things. Faith healing, in this diasporic stage, becomes a seemingly artisanal practice, but still offers a window to its inherent class dimension. In a country with a decrepit health infrastructure like the Philippines, the spiritual practice persists. It is an alternative for the rich, a test of faith, but a first response, and often the only form of medical attention, received by the poor vast majority. When exported to Lemos’ horror narrative, this material dimension is shed off. A lost opportunity for the film to have a richer portrayal since the lack of social safety nets is after all a major driving force of migration of Filipinos to countries like Greece, among others.
Emy is however pulled back by her sister as she shows she has as much control on harm as much as healing. Accompanying Teresa in a clinic for a check-up, pregnant women collapse at her presence. In a family dinner, she makes Argyris choke on a fish bone. What they have is very hard to see as a form of sisterly bond. It is difficulty to comprehend what goes on in Emy’s mind as she barely speaks and keeps a tortured look all the time. Lastly, anyone is barely speaking to her about her abilities including those who have working knowledge of it. This is excruciatingly maintained all throughout the film. Emy is a spectacle, one that is distant and hard to remain emphatic with.
Which is unfortunate since the film has several subplots, if fleshed out more, would actually put the body horror dimension in a better position to move forward the story and explore its themes. Two sisters in a foreign country with their mother absent, or one of them dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, a religious guardian witnessing changes in their bodies and behaviour, all has the potential to be compelling migrant narratives. Instead, we have inarticulate characters navigating themselves to random encounters of life in one moment, of death in another. Holy Emy is a bricolage of underexplored stories about faith, fractured nuclear families, and migration, without any concise statement about any of them. All of these became even stranger worlds in the end than they are in the beginning.
Jacob Laneria 