Review: 'Topakk,' 'My Future You' + 'Hold Me Close'

(SPOT.ph) ICYMI, the Metro Manila Film Festival 2024 is still ongoing, showcasing a diverse range of Filipino films, from spine-tingling horror to classic Filipino dramas. To guide you in your cinematic journey, here are reviews of three films featured in this year's MMFF lineup: Topakk, a stylish action thriller; My Future You, a cute romance; and Hold Me Close, a romance drama set in Japan.

Also read: GUIDE: Metro Manila Film Festival 2024

Topakk

Arjo Atayde stars as Miguel, a warehouse security guard traumatized by his time in the military. On the first night on the job, he encounters a brother and sister pair (Kokoy de Santos and Julia Montes) desperately asking to be let in, as they are on the run from a gang of police that just massacred an entire drug operation. Miguel decides to protect the siblings and spends the rest of the night fending off the corrupt police.

What happens in Topakk is often pretty cool, but between the super stylized color grading, the digital haze of visual effects, the rapid fire editing, and the shaky camera, it isn’t always easy to tell what’s happening. The firefights in particular are a little tough to parse. To be fair, maybe the chaos is the point; but there is often very little sense of where people are in relation to each other, who’s shooting and being shot at, or any character intention outside of just shooting their guns.

Things are generally better when characters fight in close quarters. It just feels like the movie has less to hide and slows down just enough to let us feel the impact of blows. Atayde and his co-star Sid Lucero deserve kudos for their brawl, which looks pretty credible. There are little bits of acting here and there that liven up proceedings, with Atayde occasionally dropping a cool line about the meaninglessness of existence in a world so suffused with violence. There are some odd implications about PTSD here, but the movie isn’t one that really invites any serious analysis. Topakk is a fairly lean and mean, nihilistic picture that is mainly about getting to the next bit of violence.

Rating: 2 ½ stars

My Future You

Twenty-one-year-olds Karen and Lex (Francine Diaz and Seth Fedelin) meet through a dating site that seems to magically pop up on the first night of a comet passing. Karen is from Marikina and Lex is from Cebu, and for the most part, they communicate solely through the site via webcam calls. The two would like their relationship to develop further, but something rather strange is standing in their way: Lex is in 2009, while Karen is in 2024. The two are somehow communicating over a gap in time, fifteen years apart.

It’s a high-concept premise that plays out cutely, more or less. There are issues, though. For one thing, the audience will often be ahead of the characters with the narrative, My Future You taking its time to get to the meat of this story. Scenes played as revelations land pretty flat, the characters just realizing things the audience must have figured out thirty minutes prior.

But by far, the biggest issue comes with the ending, which is a little difficult to talk about without spoiling things. Suffice it to say that something the film is depicting as romantic might come off as more than a little creepy. What’s disappointing is that by that point the movie actually lands on a completing theme that would have been a nice note to end on, using this odd experience to tell a tale of learning to recognize what’s good in one’s situation. But the movie goes on, and while still kind of cute, it drives toward something a lot more iffy.

Rating: 2 ½ stars

Hold Me Close

Carlo Aquino is Woody, who arrives in Karatsu, Japan hoping it will be his last stop in an international hunt for a permanent home. Julia Barretto is Lynlyn, a girl living in Karatsu who has a special power: Whenever she touches someone, she can immediately sense if they’re going to bring joy or pain into her life. The two meet, and Woody becomes determined to get a positive reading from Lynlyn. This leads to him having to confront his past, and come to peace with trauma that he’s been carrying for years.

Lynlyn ends up being the main character of this movie, but somehow remains mainly a catalyst for the emotional journey of the man-child Woody, their romance merely a pretense for him dealing with childhood trauma. It is just another twee romance where a manic pixie dream girl teaches someone how to be a real boy. Barretto and Aquino are fine in the lead roles, but the characters are just really thin.

In a last stretch, Hold Me Close makes a bid for gravity that it doesn’t ever come close to earning. It falls into a typical narrative trap and ends up undermining its own themes, returning to the positive-negative binary that the story was supposed to be challenging.

Rating: 1 ½ stars