When I was researching about this film after I watched it earlier today, I was surprised that IMDB had its year of release listed as 2015. It turns out that this entry in the 2018 Sinag Manila Film Festival had actually been released way back three years at the Marché du Film (the business arm of the Cannes Film Festival in France. This year will be the first time it was shown in local screens.
A girl who called herself Rachel Rivera had been admitted in a hospital. The film would go back and forth in time in which we would learn bits and pieces of her story that consisted of a freak car accident, her father Chris in a coma, her mother Vicky in financial dire straits, her younger brother Jacob with his weird artwork, her best friend Mindy and her strange behavior, her sexual assault at a party. But since Rachel was on an anti-depressant Escitalopram, we were just as lost as she as to which were real and which were imagined.
One unusual feature of this Filipino indie film was that it was set somewhere in suburban USA. Part of the bizarre production design of the film was that, while it was supposed to have been set in the US, the buildings all looked unmistakably Filipino. One can easily recognize the brick walls of the UP Film Center or the tower of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Mary and St. John. You see all these Filipino actors speaking in pure English like they were Americans, with no single mention of them being Filipino at all.
Tippy Dos Santos played a totally whacked-out Rachel, so different from the last time I saw her so sweet and delightful in the musical film "I Do Bidoo Bidoo" (2012). Donning a blonde hairstyle, Dos Santos gave an intense and compelling performance of a physically and emotionally exhausting lead role. She had to keep audiences on their toes as to what her character was really up to, or not up to. She had got to be one of the top choices for Best Actress in the festival.
Toni Moynihan (previously more well-known as Maritoni Fernandez) played Rachel's problematic mother Vicky, who was at her wit's end as to how to make ends meet as a supermarket clerk, all the while handing an emotionally-disturbed child. The other local theater actors I recognized were Pinky Amador (as a classmate's mom), Paul Holmes and Robbie Zialcita (as doctors), Justine Pena (as a confused girlfriend) and David Bianco (as a sleazy pervert). TV hostess Lexi Schulze played a sympathetic nurse,
Director Yam Laranas, who had not been heard of lately after his previous horror hits like "Sigaw" (2004) and its Hollywood version "The Shout"(2008) and "The Road" (2011), was still in touch with his ability to keep audiences engaged in his puzzling, non-linear presentation of his story, slowly giving meaningful clues along the way. The line between reality and imagination were certainly effectively blurred to great effect. However, I felt the final exposition may have been a little too generous with the answers, instead of just allowing audiences fill in the blanks. 7/10.
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