WHETHER THE WEATHER IS FINE
In the aftermath of a deadly storm, a young man, his girlfriend, and his mother wander their devastated city searching for their own forms of rescue.
Carlo Francisco Manatad’s singular, disturbing, and darkly comedic debut feature captures the bizarre nature of a world in which climate change’s impact on extreme weather has become an everyday concern. Miguel (Daniel Padilla) wakes up one day in a roofless house, surrounded for miles around by rubble, downed power lines, and dead bodies. This isn’t the aftermath of some hypothetical nuclear Armageddon, it’s the Filipino city of Tacloban circa 2013, when most of the city was leveled by Typhoon Haiyan. Miguel wanders the ruins in a daze, eventually finding his tenacious girlfriend Andrea (Rans Rifol), who’s determined to escape for Manila before a rumored second storm hits. They attempt to convince Miguel’s devout mother Norma (Charo Santos) to join them, but she’s determined to locate her estranged husband. The three must decide whether to get out together or follow their own paths, while all around them, their fellow survivors respond to the devastation in ways both comprehensible and utterly bizarre. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Manatad injects the film with a destabilizing jolt of pitch-black humor and Felliniesque surrealism, calling attention to the inherent absurdity of real life at a time when, as one minor character says, “nothing makes sense anymore.”
CAST: Charo Santos, Daniel Padilla, Rans Rifol
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