Like normal horror movies were not enough, the Philippines has decided to take it to the next level. Deleter is a techno-horror movie that was released on December 25th, 2022. Written and directed by Mikhail Red, the movie was pushed for the 2022 Metro Manila Film Festival.
The movie revolves around a girl working at a content moderation office tasked to filter out any forms of graphic content that may be uploaded on social media sites. The girl, Lyra, has enough baggage and trauma of her own, making her look cold and emotionless to the outside world.
While going through the graphic and nearly traumatizing content and removing them from sites, she deletes a suicide video left by one of her co-workers, or deleter as they are called. The movie is about what haunts Lyra after she has deleted the video and how she finds herself unable to escape from her hurting past and eerie present.
The movie Deleter stars Nadine Lustre as Lyra, the deleted, and Louise Delos Reyes as Aileen. Filipino actor McCoy De Leon plays the role of a character named Jace, and Jeffery Hidalgo is cast as Simon. Since its release, the film has garnered significant positive responses from its viewers worldwide and well-deserved awards at the Metro Manila Film Festival 2022, just like Red had wanted.
Deleter Ending Explained
Anybody who has watched the movie knows that Lustre plays the role of a content moderator, otherwise known as a deleter, who goes through all sorts of graphic, violent, and I-never-want-to-open-the-internet-ever-again kinds of content and prevents them from being on social media sites for too long.
She does so with such a poker face that people around her are convinced she is AI. She has her mysterious but weird boss, Simon, who provides calming pills that keep her sanity intact, along with the only relief in her life, her friend Jace. She catches her co-deleter, Aileen killing herself and leaving a suicide video for the record.
Lyra comes across that video, but as a part of her haunting job, she is forced to delete it, which she does. This one thing sets in motion a set of scary things happening to Lyra, with dark secrets about her job as a deleter and her boss being revealed. While to others, Lyra may seem completely unaffected by the content, they are unaware of the calming pills she is being made to take by her boss.
The movie is slow-burn and gets set in motion with Aileen jumping off of the office building. It is easily deduced that Aileen’s death and Lyra’s boss are somehow connected. Aileen’s death brings over a cloud of paranoia to the office. Lyra finds herself being targeted by something that tortures the life out of her.
The torture begins
She finds scary messages directed at her and eerie vibes wherever she goes. She finds herself caught in dreams that feel so life-like and real. Her memories feel all tangled, and she confuses her trauma with that of Aileen’s death. Throughout the movie, Lyra is this calm, stoic person who looks like she has a storm brewing behind her eyes.
Aileen’s death and whatever happens to Lyra after lets the storm loose, causing Lyra to suffer some more. The audience may have expected some gruesome story about how Lyra’s boss drove Aileen to her death and how Lyra takes bloody revenge from her side. Still, the movie’s climax reveals that Aileen existed in the form of a ghost after her death. A tech-savvy ghost, to be precise.
We know that Lyra has had a tough past, and the climax, through her vivid dreams and memories, reveals that she has witnessed horrible things happen around her since her childhood, which she was asked to keep to herself. She has grown to be a person that sees bad things happen, witnesses them, and never opens her mouth about them again.
This way of living helps her with her job, where she sees thousands of crimes, but all she can do is delete all the evidence. This takes a toll on her mentally. So when she tries to turn a blind eye to her co-deleter’s suicide, it comes back to haunt her in more ways than one.
Aileen’s truth
It turns out that Aileen was depressed heavily because of what she had to go through daily while filtering the graphic content. And, known only to Lyra, she had also been harassed at work by her boss. Lyra tried to tell the police investigating Aileen’s suicide about the latter’s crumbling mental health and the sexual abuse she had faced at work by her boss.
Lyra’s boss, a no-nonsense man, forced her to stick to the company policies and not say a word to the police. This eventually leads her to delete all video evidence that Aileen had left, leaving the police with nothing. So, she returns as a tech ghost to haunt Lyra, who did almost nothing about her death. She haunts her devices and the elevator she takes, and she is there in her house and her workplace.
Lyra’s character faces changes in habit, and she continues to pretend that Aileen’s death does not bother her. It comes back to her when she first imagines Aileen in a convenience store. A classic revenge route as the end to the story would have been perfect, but the movie maker, Mikhail, chose to continue with the horror genre.
The climax of the movie reveals that it was, after all, Aileen’s ghost that was torturing Lyra, that she did not imagine her presence and her doing things to her memories. Aileen, as a ghost, was all real. The movie questions life after death, especially in a world drowning in machines and technological devices.
The movie ends with Lyra almost losing her sanity with her traumatic past and vengeful ghost spicing things up to a point where it becomes unbearable. She leaves her job and never looks back. The movie’s end reveals that Aileen was, going aft, er, Lyra, for revenge only. She was her only friend in that gloomy office building, and she chose to do nothing about her death.
This was the sole motive behind Aileen turning into a ghost, which felt like a disappointing reason to many. With all the slow build-up towards the climax, only to reveal petty revenge to be the cause for all the mishappenings took away from the impact. The movie ended with Lyra alive but slowly losing herself in all the nightmares and traumatic memories.
Lyra’s end
She finds her cool, unfazed self breaking apart and getting stuck in a loop of her past trauma and Aileen’s. Mikhail Red said the movie was an open ending, with a question posed to the audience.
Lyra finds herself unable to escape her guilt for ignoring her friend’s plea for help and deleting hundreds of videos that could have been evidence against legit criminal activities.
The movie ends with Lyra being traumatized even more than she was at the start of the movie, just that this time she cannot collect herself and pretend to be unaffected. The last scene almost asks the audience that with social media taking over the world and our lives, how long can we ignore our reality, and how much violence will we normalize and ignore just to protect ourselves?
Deleter is a social commentary on how through social media and easy access to the internet, a lot of things go ignored and that its presence in our lives has made the supposed empathetic human race an emotionless rock that has slowly stopped caring about the world around us.
