Dale and Sandy return to Manila for their wedding. At their welcome dinner, Dale’s mother expresses her superstitions about weddings such as siblings not marrying in the same year. Visiting her parents, Sandy is surprised to discover that the house next door is empty. She is further troubled when she learns that her childhood friend Helen went ahead with her marriage soon after the (unexplained) death of her father Dr. Quisimbang who ran his clinic in the house. Without waiting for a year to pass after his death, superstition had it that the wedding was cursed and led to the demise of Helen, her new husband and mother.
Sandy experiences visions of a ghostly flower girl in the house next door, and realizes that Dale’s niece Joya is the only other one who sees her. As Dale and Sandy prepare for their wedding, we follow the course of another wedding – that of Diana and Brian whose marriage starts on an ominous note when the church bell ringer is found dead in the belfry. Brian dies in an accident as Dale and Sandy are exchanging vows, and Diana is terrorized by the ghostly girl. Mastering a battery of horror effects, Roño unleashes a cascade of strange events - relatives die off but in place of corpses, there are wedding garments; Dale is caught in a genuinely creepy scene in his hotel room that begins but does not end in the Psycho-style shower. Sandy’s parents hide a dark secret, and the fates of Sandy and Diana are twisted together in a climax of that plays out on a feast day celebrated by the bizarrely dressed Followers of St. John.
A huge box office hit of 2006 in the Philippines, Sukob is also notable for its smart casting of two major actresses Kris Aquino and Claudine Barretto whom Rono directs with his usual flair.
As with his earlier horror outing Feng Shui (FEFJ 2005), Roño here bases his equations on the family, its dark secrets, and the house as repository. He conceives of the horror film as a jigsaw puzzle, composed not only of a complex web of family members but also of mythologies that create a parallel universe of phenomenae that to varying degrees reflect the turbulence and anxieties of the “real” world. But the jigsaw puzzle is not quite completed in the film, leaving us some space for deduction or speculation. Who exactly is the ghostly flower girl? Perhaps she is the aborted child of the mysterious Dr. Quisimbang and reflects the sins of the fathers that continue to stalk the earth.