One night, 88 year old Filomena "Lilia" Reyes (Bing Pimentel) was shot in the abdomen in her home in Baguio City. The ER nurse Isabelle Pineda (Beauty Gonzales) told Ms. Lilia that it was a 30-ish man with long hair brought her, and assumed he was her son. However, the old woman teasingly told her that he was not her son, but her boyfriend Matias (Carlo Aquino). When they got comfortable with each other, Lilia began to tell Isabelle her life story.
This new film, directed and co-written by Adolfo Alix Jr., was mostly set in Baguio City. Lilia's story spanned decades starting from 1941 when the Japanese invaded and she was moved out of Baguio by her parents, and ended in 2018 when she was shot in her home. There were episodes in between, set in 1954, 1960, 1971, 1975, and 1986, when important stages in the epic love story between young Lilia (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) and Matias.
There was a subplot about a senior policeman Inspector Rafael Angua, Jr. (Bembol Roco, Jr.), nicknamed "The Collector" in his precinct because he never solved a case. Angua suspected that they was dealing with a long cold case of a serial killer whose spree started since 1970s. This was all fine, except that the casting of 71 year-old Roco creates confusion because a scene showed him to be only a small child in the 1970s.
Another subplot involved Ami (Cristine Reyes), the owner of the Black Cat Tattoo Studio. Her look was all Goth, in keeping with the eerie medieval castle ambience of her place of business. Old Lilia needed two units of type A-positive blood. Matias knew Ami kept blood in bags in her refrigerator, and lo and behold, two units of this supposedly rare blood type was right there in the very front! How she got them was never explained.
The acting performances of the lead cast could not be faulted, especially Aquino, Pimentel, and the ever-ravishing Curtis-Smith. Aquino was hampered by the ugly wig he had to wear as Matias. He never changed his thick mullet with bowl-cut bangs, ever since he was a native warrior during the Spanish era! Because he did not vary his hairstyle to fit the times, he was suspiciously distinct, such that Angua even recognized him from a photograph taken in the 1970s.
The locations Alix chose to shoot in were very scenic and appropriate for the story he was telling, from Lilia's beautiful houses in Baguio, the old mansion with the tall corn fields in Batangas, to the hanging coffins of Sagada. It was too bad that he stuck with time-worn cliches -- shapeshifting into a black cat, sleeping in a coffin, melting in the sun, etc... -- for the creature Matias was to be, coming off as unintentionally funny in the process. 5/10
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