NOCEBO (2022) MOVIE REVIEW 

Filipino here, if you notice during their "healing" sessions. You'll sometimes hear Diana saying the word GABA, it basically means divine retribution but is more closely associated to a curse that can slowly or immediately take root based on how bad a persons wrong doing is. And in Christine's case, Diana took it into her own hands to give Christine her GABA. And the movie didn't explain it too well but Diana called herself an Ongo, a type of witch with an abundance of powers like flight, animal communication/control, hexes and shape-shifting into any animal it wishes, sometimes bigger than they should be. Diana was literally that dog Christine saw at the beginning, and she planted that tick as a curse and punishment, she was also the dog Bob's saw when Felix was taking her upstairs. As for the bird, the first time Felix was attacked it was their pet bird that was being controlled by Diana, and since that was the family's pet bird one can assume it was unwilling to submit to Diana's control, which is why you see the tick coming out of its body because it acted as a medium of sorts, and when she was trying to get close to Bob's you can see her communicating with the crow, not controlling it, as for the second time Felix was attacked that was Diana taking the form of their pet bird, hence why you hear it say "be careful of the stairs", also I'd argue that she was the giant tick that Christine saw during her sleep paralysis since Ongo's are also closely associated to sleep paralysis. And the foot-print, that was left by Diana's dead daughter, it's a folktale here in the Philippines where if you leave a hand full of ash out on your doorstep it allows a dead loved one to visit for one last time before their soul departs into the after-life. As for Christine combusting that was basically the GABA at work, her greed caused those workers to needlessly die in the fire so as punishment she had to go through the same thing they did. And you might say why didn't Diana just act upon her curse on Christine the moment she planted that tick. Well like Diana said to Christine when she was telling her the story about how she knows folk remedy, Ongo's can both heal and destroy and aren't inherently evil in nature. She probably wanted the time to see if Christine was going to be remorseful or try to take accountability for her actions but as we saw in the movie, she wasn't. Her first reaction to knowing that people died in her factory was that she was shocked sure but she was trying to dodge it immediately by saying "I can't process this right now" implying that she wants to forget, she's guilty for her actions sure, but instead of living with that guilt which is also a form of taking accountability, she is trying to forget. You can see this in the movie how multiple times that event was bought up but she deflects it or downplays it every single time, plus with the whole memory loss thing that's basically her shtick as a character. And that I assume is something that Diana didn't like hence why she cursed her to death. And during moments where she was healed she tried getting back to the same line of work that got people killed, heck even in that scene where the CEO or whatever pitched the theme to be Southeast Asian she was simply fine with it. Well this is just my 2-cents on the movie, I hope this was useful insight for you to fully understand some scenes.

The filipino representation here is on point superb

Love when a horror turns out really good. Loved this one

This almost puts me in mind of House of the Devil which I love. Like a slow burn. Very atmosphere heavy. It's on Shudder now. Ill check it out tonight after work. I can't wait. 😃

I've not watched this movie yet its on Netflix I just wanted to know what it was about.

I loved these movie it really suprised me i havent seen vivarium so will check that out

while I loved the movie, Vivarium was better as a horror film.

is Diana a witch?

I just got the trailer for this on my Shudder RU-vid sub yeah…Didn’t realise it was on apple already?