The story of a surly Filipina teen with divine and impossible gifts—she can heal the sick, read minds, generate miracles, and she bleeds from her eyes—Holy Emy is nevertheless situated inside a notably disenchanted world of urban bustle, tacky 21st century design, and ugly handheld camerawork. Araceli Lemos’s film parts from its blunt docudrama strategy only for a couple of sequences, and then just briefly, as when Emy wades into an oil-blighted shoreline to return life to one of hundreds of dead fish. Without betraying any of its secrets, the film wants to make a point or two about the perception of the mystical inside our matrix of rationality, modern politics, and organized religion, only gradually revealing the how and the why of Emy’s powers. The viewer is repeatedly grounded in the corporeal, with vomit, blood, and mortified flesh as a recurring motif (although it’s anything but gross, just very matter-of-fact), while the question of God, the Devil, and whatever lies in between is settled by the somewhat ambivalent figure of Emy herself, whose first great act of healing is so brutal it looks like sexual assault. Apologies if this all sounds very high concept, ’cuz the mundane storytelling stuff—sullen Emy lives in Athens under uncertain circumstances with her pregnant sister, mom is home in the Philippines for mysterious reasons—is all very gripping, while the film’s leads are excellent, young Abigael Loma in particular as the wholly inscrutable creature of the title.

Stir, May 2023