By Peter Keough

Director Rafael Manuel’s dazzling debut turns a fantastical Philippine golf resort into a miniature world of caste, exploitation, and resistance.

Filipiñana. Directed by Rafael Manuel. At the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, September 11-16.

Jorrybell Agoto in Filipiñana. Photo: Kino Lorber

At the beginning of Rafael Manuel’s impressive debut feature—an oneiric, whimsically absurd parable of exploitation and resistance—a bus carrying Chinese tourists is forced to stop amid a crowd of desperate people waiting for water rations. The country is suffering through a drought and heat wave, but not at the bus’s destination: a golf resort that proves an amalgam of the magical and the tawdry in an otherwise cruel world. Both locations—emblems of want and plenty—serve as microcosms of the Philippines and of societies everywhere subjected to entrenched privilege and pathological greed.

Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a 17-year-old from the impoverished rural region of Ilocos, has just started work at the club as a tee girl. In regimented lines, she and her coworkers mechanically place golf balls for wealthy patrons to drive down the fairway, risking painful blows from errant shots and ricochets. Their overseers are tyrannical but curiously lax, giving Isabel opportunities to wander the grounds and explore. The club is a green-and-pastel faux Eden of lush trees—some of them parched, then swiftly replaced—and luminous water hazards, its grandiosely tacky architecture and shadowy pathways patrolled by golf carts. It is a dreamland reminiscent of the sinister kitsch of The Village in the 1960s television series The Prisoner, or Wes Anderson’s worlds flattened and drained of innocence.

It is a caste society, each stratum marked by its own uniform. Isabel and the other tee girls wear drab pale green, while the female caddies sport salmon-pink outfits and conical peasant hats. The clientele are color-coordinated, too: dour Chinese tourists in white, a group of clerics in saffron robes. A band of blind musicians in white and pink, all wearing dark glasses, gets lost on one of the fairways. Isabel guides them back to the ballroom, where they perform for robotic dancers in a set worthy of David Lynch.

One of the golfers assigned to Isabel is Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), the club’s president and a mysterious figure with vitiligo. The other tee girls make randy jokes about his pigmentation, speculating about the color of his balls. Isabel, however, is intrigued when he reveals his own Ilocano background and speaks to her in the language. He tells her to let him know if she ever needs anything. He seems kindly enough, though a lengthy karaoke performance of “You Always Hurt the One You Love”—sung to the rapturous delight of his sycophants—exudes menace.

Meanwhile, Clara, a student visiting from New York, resists her genially entitled uncle (Carlos Siguion-Reyna), a business associate of Dr. Palanca, who is trying to lure her back to the Philippines. Having encountered more progressive ideas in the United States, Clara is repelled by the country club’s near-feudal attitudes. She draws the line when her uncle advises her to accept the Mar-a-Lago-like rules and take a mulligan after hitting a ball into the woods. “Everyone here plays like that,” he tells her. “No one will know.” He will repeat those words later, with far more drastic implications.

Interspersed with these narratives are appearances by an elusive little girl in red—one of the film’s few flashes of that color—wearing a dragonfly hairpin and fleeing her frantic governess. In some respects, she embodies Clara’s and Isabel’s shared desire to escape this false, invidious paradise. But resistance here seems futile, or at best half-hearted and naïve; in this regard, Filipiñana uncharacteristically loses its way in the rough.

Nonetheless, the film remains exquisite in its formal beauty. It is edited through jarring, whimsically surreal juxtapositions that prove unexpectedly illuminating, while startling revelations emerge through transitions within a single frame—by way of mise-en-scène and sly camera movements. In tone, mood, and theme, it recalls such films as Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (2023), fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s Norte (2014), and Magellan (2026). It is truly a film capable of restoring one’s hope in the future of cinema, if not in the world itself.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He was the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).