There's a cruelty to In My Mother's Skin that may seem off-putting at first, but one must reckon with the sheer scale of the violence already occurring before these characters are even introduced to us. The Japanese occupation of the Philippines was a particularly vicious period in the country's history; if Filipinos weren't fighting or hiding from their invaders, many of them were trying to maintain a precariously submissive, neutral existence, or they were being turned against each other due to the conflict of war trickling down between the social classes. All these things are implicit throughout Kenneth Dagatan's film, which doesn't try to reenact World War II but capture the total absence of hope during this period.

Dagatan's style of horror insists on a very slow pace, emphasizing every footstep leading to a horrifying reveal, and not just the main scare itself. This choice doesn't always work, especially as certain beats begin to repeat themselves, but the film's incredibly confident visual style fills every moment with an eerie paranoia. Gothic, shadowy interiors, nasty gore, and one opulently costumed fairy make everything perpetually unsettling—gradually forcing us to accept that these contradictions are just the reality of life under war.

Unlike in many other horror films where characters' anguished screams are arguably played more towards the audience than for good storytelling, the cast of In My Mother's Skin comes across as genuinely horrified. Their trauma runs several layers deep, with Angeli Bayani's caretaker character holding back bitter resentment for her employers, and Beauty Gonzalez and James Mavie Estrella in almost destructive mourning over the vanishing of the family patriarch. But it's young Felicity Kyle Napuli who steals the show, as Tala's every attempt to make things better backfires—leaving her with a level of guilt that no child should ever have to live with.