For a two-hour film, it feels as eternal as the immortal Matias (Carlo Aquino) sans the urgency of his desire to convert his aging, dying lover, Lilia (Bing Pimentel), into vampirism before time runs out. Lilia was hospitalized after an attempt at her life, yet continues to refuse Matias' offer of immortality.
She details her story to an audience surrogate, nurse Isabelle (Beauty Gonzalez), the latter experiencing a usual day in an understaffed public hospital, yet this one time, affords the leisure to indulge Lilia's lengthy tale.
This format allowed director Adolfo Alix Jr. To lay out multiple timelines, from the Spanish Colonial Period where the once indigenous and mortal Matias was inoculated with vampirism by a foreigner. There is also the Japanese Occupation, where Matias met a younger Lilia (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) in an attempt to make vampirism an allegory to colonialism, the horrors of war and how these events fester into the present day through corruption and violence symbolized by an undying but infected Filipino man. Yet this felt fleeting and would have benefited from additional depth.
Parallel to Lilia's story is a police procedural investigating a string of decades-long murders that lead back to Matias. But this supposed investigative thriller is as laid back as the slow and intimate romance narrative, offering no contrast, and only tiptoes on commentary about the war on drugs and police brutality instead of a full pursuit of such themes that could have naturally connected to the colonialist elements. Meanwhile, Lilia needed a blood transfusion, and in a setting of scarce medical resources, Matias turns toward an almost out of place modern vampire (Cristine Reyes) operating a tattoo shop that secretly hoards packed blood in a fridge. The absurdity of this sequence is the least of its problems, as it further fractured the story with an additional subplot.
The crux of the story was supposedly knowing Lilia's reason why she still refused to commit to an immortal life with Matias - this was never answered, or at least was very vague. Perhaps a bittersweet declaration of a love made full by time's passage or yearning an end to a life of suffering. The narrative never really offers a closure to the main love story, despite most of its subplots having contrived dialogue spoon-feeding the audience. Maybe Lilia symbolizes the nation who wants to severe her ties to Matias - a metaphor of corruption with roots from the colonialists that birthed him. At the very least, the film is visually pleasing and the production looks premium.
Finally, despite its fictional nature, may we continue to avoid portrayals in media of lovers that started when one of them is a child and the other an older man (centuries older in this).
