August 14, 2022
Yexel Santos (Sean de Guzman) is a very popular personality on social media. He posted videos of himself featuring various products, and they would invariably go viral. He frequently hung around a group of vlogger friends that included rich kids, Anna (Quinn Carillo) and Andrew (Karl Aquino). Yexel was very popular among his lady fans, but he was notorious for shunning commitments and collecting one-night-stands.
One night, Yexel met Nina (Cloe Barreto) in a bar, and, as was his usual style, took her home to a condo which he loaned from a friend for a night of wild sex, and asking them to leave right away. Feeling Nina was different from other girls, Yexel called her for a second date. Since then, Nina began to follow Yexel around, even confronting other girls he would pick up. When Yexel told her to leave him alone, Nina would not be ignored.
After a very prolific debut year last 2021, Sean de Guzman tries to make up lost ground with this, only his second lead star credit for 2022 after "Hugas" earlier this year. However, the drab-looking de Guzman felt miscast as a charismatic online influencer. His video blogs were plain and bland, do not look impressive, engaging nor even attractive enough to go viral. The way he delivered his spiels was boring, colorless and lacked eloquence.
Cloe Barreto rose from anonymity to immediately headline two Vivamax movies this year alone - - "Silab" and "Tahan" - - both times playing crazy violent women. Co-lead and crazy again this time around, she boldly took on a character inspired by Glenn Close and Kathy Bates. However, Barreto still lacked the acting maturity to elevate her role of Nina above that of a run-of-the-mill psychotically-obsessed sexpot.
Quinn Carillo now has her third credit as a screen writer after two other Vivamax offerings "Biyak" and "Tahan". Like before, Carillo also gets to play the character who delivers the final line. Her plot followed that of Adrian Lynne's "Fatal Attraction" (1988) in the first half, then mixed in some of Rob Reiner's "Misery" (1990) in the second. Yexel's playboy status made way for this film to accommodate Vivamax's requirement for sex scenes.
What made Carillo's story different from the films which inspired it was how she wove the local social media influencer culture into its plot. There were bits of it scattered in various parts of the film, but it would have been better if it could have tackled this fascinating phenomenon deeper. Carillo saved the best for the final scene, which gave disturbing insight into the warped character of these supposed "model" netizens. 4/10.
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