REVIEW ‘What If?’: An agonizing watch

Watching honeymooners Jecs and Billie, played by JM de Guzman and Alessandra de Rossi, in the Netflix Original marital drama What If, you get this instant desire to book that exact same rustic cottage in Panglao Island. It's incredibly beautiful.

While they are bickering inside their Instagrammable nest in the middle of a typhoon, you wonder about the production design and how much it contributes to the pretty interior design of the cottage — and not whether this unpleasant couple can literally and figuratively "weather the storm."

Directed by Emmanuel Quindo Palo and written by Mike G. Rivera, the drama feels more invested in color grading, costume, design, cinematography and all the visual aspects of the film than in the marital drama itself.

The script tries so hard to cram multiple issues to stir conflict, but they are delivered half-baked and dry. It's as if Jecs and Billie are trying so hard to find something to get angry about in the first hours, minutes, and seconds of their married life.

But, despite the film's herculean effort to project naturalism, everything feels staged.

The fights do not spark and evolve organically. They do not take root. They are flimsy and contrived and do not realistically escalate.

De Rossi's Billie has some serious daddy issues and baggage. Her complex trauma could have been a goldmine for substantial arguments, but it is wasted on a disjointed and shallow script.

You could sense De Rossi's committed performance and desire to breathe life into her traumatized character, but the dialogue and the lines do not hit the mark. They fall weakly and get lost in the rain.

The script plants troubles — social media addiction and validation, jealousy, job security of creatives, parenthood and child abuse — but these are merely skimmed over the surface.

The newlyweds' biggest problem is Billie's premature ovarian failure. She claims she is infertile, in short. But if you google her condition, she can still get intermittent ovulation, hence she is not 100-percent barren.

Jecs himself doesn't have any problems with her medical condition and is hopeful. So what is the problem? The problem is Jecs' mother (Ana Abad Santos) who keeps calling, insisting Billie use dragon oil to get knocked up. And this already pushes Billie to a near-breakdown.

De Guzman's Jecs, meanwhile, has no distinct personality. He's just a blah musician who strums bland music. What with his bland image and bland music, it is not convincing at all that he has some social media presence.

The movie is further encumbered by flashbacks. The backstories are highly unnecessary as they contain information that can easily be incorporated into the present day. Instead, the flashbacks merely serve as platform to accommodate supporting actors who are more like visual props than important narrative figures.

Supporting characters Soliman Cruz and Angie Castrence, who play one-dimensional cottage helpers, aim to provide a perspective on mature and long-term married couples but end up failing to provide any wisdom.

More agonizing than the forced marital agony is the severe lack of chemistry between De Rossi and De Guzman. When they are not bickering, they are free-diving or singing just to stretch the runtime.

What if they just break up? But you don't really care. It's hard to sympathize and empathize with poorly written characters.

Dull, overlong, and forced, the film is agonizing to finish. What If you just skip it?

1 out of 5 stars
Premiered 7 September on Netflix