The Echo of Yam Laranas: Horror at its best

Ironically, it was Yam Laranas' horror movie The Echo that made waves in Cannes as an artistic and masterfully directed film. Fellow Filipino Brillante Mendoza's art movie Serbis, on the other hand, was generally described as horrible, achieving with its crude "boil popping scene" new levels of yuckiness.
Yam Laranas wasn't even in the running for awards. The Echo was screened in Cannes to snag more film distributors. Brillantes was gunning for top prize and was a much hyped entry to Director's Fortnight.
As I said, it's truly ironic.
But really not a surprise. The young Laranas is widely recognized as something of a boy genius in Philippine Cinema.
While The Echo was predictably promoted "from the producers of The Ring and The Grudge" causing many to dismiss it as yet another Asian horror remake, early reviews of The Echo promise it is anything but.  The normally snarky reviewers of highly influential horror blogs Twitchfilm.net and Bloody-Disgusting.com wax poetic about The Echo's "art-house" qualities, describing Yam Laranas almost reverentially as a "hugely accomplished cinematographer" who, despite having an outside director of photography on board The Echo, "had his fingerprints all over the visuals and the shooting style" in a movie that was "far more about building mood and tone than piling on shock after shock."
Obviously, the kid's got an almost cult-like following. Watchers of The Echo in film sites like IMDB hold vigil for news of distribution. Yam Laranas's masterful direction may have placed the film in the slim and rarified category occupied by deeply scary but artistically rendered ghost stories like The Others. Not a bad place to be.  And for fans of The Echo and Yam Laranas who probably can't make a mediocre film if his life depended on it, perhaps the only place to be.