September 10, 2026
Joey del Mundo (Bela Padilla) worked as an assistant director and choreographer in a commercial ad company. She loved her work and was very busy, a favorite of her boss Alex (Peach Caparas). However in one more week, Joey was already about to leave for Canada to continue her studies. One night, Joey invited her elder sister Dianne (Ryza Cenon) to go out for a night-out with her. Tragically, Dianne never made it back home anymore that night.
Joey had to forego all her Canada plans to take care of Dianne's little daughter Denise (Dani Zee). As she had no housekeeping experience, Joey could not keep up with Denise's daily needs alongside the tasks expected of her in her commercial shoots. Out of desperation, Joey texted the other contact person in Denise's school record. Her name was Bella Concepcion (Maricel Soriano), who admitted that she was Denise's grandmother on her father's side.
There have been a number of past films tackling this same story about someone whose life got topsy-turvy because he suddenly needed to take care of an unexpected child not his own. Writer-director Marla Ancheta gave Joey's reluctant guardian trope another dimension by involving a mother Bella who felt guilty that her son Carl (Marlo Mortel) would not accept his daughter because of a painful episode of betrayal they shared in the past.
While it was treated as supposedly funny, I did not understand why Joey was so rude to Bella during their first meeting. I get that Joey was very frustrated and stressed out, but Bella was not doing anything to provoke her disrespectful tone of voice and behavior against a much older woman. I guess Ancheta was trying to create initial friction between these two women, but this did not seem to be a realistic scenario for their "meet-cute" of sorts.
As was usual in female-led films, men were the jerks here. Bella's husband Fred (Jeric Raval) once brought home a daughter from his second family, which destroyed his first family. You'd understand why Carl would want to protect his current family from suffering the same fate if he introduced Denise. Too bad Ancheta did not elaborate why Carl abandoned Dianne in the first place before he met Stacey (Krissha Viaje) and had their Winter (Cali Buena).
Maricel Soriano's Bella was a delightful lady with her Gen X sense of humor. She shone best in that confrontation scene with Carl with her effortless tears, and endears us to her more. Ancheta's script really gave Joey the shorter end of the stick, from her sister's death, instant motherhood, job troubles, physical disability. Bela Padilla portrayed Joey with rawness, abrasive even, but she was tough, and we still root for her to get her life back on track. 7/10
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