April 9, 2023
Construction firm CEO Lucy Espinosa (Kylie Padilla) got her wedding annulled, and flew off to Switzerland without telling her mother or her daughter. She had emailed her best friend Belle (Megan Campbell) all her instructions to be done in her absence. The main purpose of Lucy's visit to enroll herself into a facility called Vivere Diu that conducted assisted voluntary death (or AVD), a morbid activity that was legal in Switzerland.
Noah Brocker (Gerald Anderson) was a half-Swiss, half-Filipino young man who was currently in between jobs. He and Lucy kept on seeing each other a number of times, so when he saw her again at the cemetery, in front of Charlie Chaplin's grave, he introduced himself to her. Soon enough after getting to know each other, Lucy got comfortable with Noah, and eventually shared her secret plan with him.
At first glance, "Unravel" looked like another one of those local romantic films which had been filmed in a foreign country. However, its main topic turned out to be so much darker -- that of assisted voluntary death. The pun in its subtitle "A Swiss Side Love Story" already gave that a clear hint. The trailer pretty much gave the whole plot away. What was left to discover by watching the whole film was why she wanted to do it, and how the film would end.
The rest of the film was a virtual tourism video promoting the picturesque natural beauty of Switzerland, which also served to buffer the depressing nature of the plot and to fluff up the running time. From the Canyon Swing at Glacier Canyon in Grindelwald to an aerial closeup view of the Matterhorn, down to the dock and pier on Lake Brienz in Iseltwald (made famous in the K-drama "Crash Landing on You"), the audience is taken on a virtual tour.
Padilla and Anderson do their best to convincingly portray their characters, one so hopelessly negative, and the other so hopefully positive. The dialog between them, as written by Senedy Que, do occasionally sound contrived, not the way you'd hear real people talk. Some lines were so patronizingly sweet, they can be cringe-y. However, the chemistry between the two actors save the film from these criticisms about the script.
How the whole story would turn out at the end can be triggering for certain audiences who may have encountered such tragedies in their lives. Mental health issues can make people do things you would not expect them to do, even if you think you already know them very well. Bad things can still happen without any obvious warning signs. Given what happened, the film's ending could have completely gone the opposite way from the way it did. 6/10.
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