The cinema was dark but alive.
Well, it helped that a trove of stars from GMA were present.
We were all there for “P77,” the latest horror film from GMA Pictures.
It was quite the ride.
“P77” didn’t just haunt with shadows, sinister figures, ghosts — it tore into something deeper.
It was grief. It was exile. It was what happens to a soul stretched too thin— too far from home, too helpless, too dazed, too confused.
Barbie Forteza is a revelation here. No longer just the darling of primetime, she walked into this story not as an actress, but as a woman unraveling.
Her portrayal of Luna, an overseas worker forced to return home for a sick sibling, didn’t feel performed. It felt lived. You didn’t just watch her suffer—you carried it with you.
She moved like someone who had seen too much and slept too little. You saw the ache behind her eyes, the way she blinked through memories that hadn’t quite settled.
And when the scares came—and they did, in brutal, well-timed waves—they weren’t cheap tricks. They were rooted in a truth deeper than fear: the despair of being too far away when your family needs you.
The guilt. The longing. The unraveling of the mind that comes when the world you left has changed beyond recognition—and maybe, so have you.
P77 here is a penthouse unit. It was more than just a haunted place. It was a metaphor. A place of false luxury hiding deep rot. The kind of place where grief wears heels holding a glass of red wine. The kind of fear you can’t just run from, because it’s in you.
The film—helmed by Derick Cabrido, who knows his ghosts as much as his people—pulls no punches. The pacing is taut. The frights are earned. You curse under your breath because you are genuinely surprised, again and again. But it’s not just about fear. It’s about a mind on the edge. A woman who can’t tell if she’s being haunted or if she’s already gone too far into her own darkness.
Forteza is surrounded by actors who don’t act so much as embody. Jackielou Blanco, Carlos Siguion-Reyna, JC Alcantara—they all brought a grounded weight, the kind that horror stories often forget. And the young boy, Euwenn Mikaell, delivered heartbreak with the silence of a child too sick to dream.
But it’s Barbie’s film. Her pain. Her descent. Her stubborn grip on hope, even when the world around her spins and splits. You don’t often see that in horror. Not like this. Not with this kind of soul.
“P77” does what few horror films dare. It asks: what happens when the monsters aren’t just in the dark, but in the mirror, in the voice that tells you you’re too late, too far, too broken?
This wasn’t just a scream-fest. It was a story about the wounded psyche—about isolation, sacrifice, the toll of working oceans away, and what happens when the tether to home frays to a whisper.
Now showing in cinemas.
