Cinemalaya Review: 'Tirik' finds power in conversation
May-i Guia Padilla finds an engaging vehicle for social commentary in a road trip that moves from familiar banter to questions of guilt, faith and survival.
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May-i Guia Padilla finds an engaging vehicle for social commentary in a road trip that moves from familiar banter to questions of guilt, faith and survival.
May-i Guia Padilla’s Tirik is a two-hander built around an unlikely road trip: Paring Bert (Rocco Nacino), a Catholic priest, and Santos Mira (Floyd Tena), his longtime parishioner and taxi driver, travel from Manila toward Cavite while their conversation gradually exposes the moral contradictions beneath their respective lives.
The filmmaking can be crude, with conspicuous visual effects, CGI and even puppetry, but the limitations of the execution become secondary to what works best: May-i Guia Padilla and Charlson Ong's writing and the natural performances of its two leads.
Tena is particularly effective as Santos, giving the taxi driver a humility and innocence that make his comic ignorance among the film’s most engaging qualities. Nacino, meanwhile, makes the priest effectively irritating in his judgmental certainty.
Their exchanges become the film’s real engine. Here is a theologian and a man concerned primarily with survival, two people from very different worlds who nevertheless have known each other for years. Through their arguments about morality, guilt, vice, faith and sin, Tirik gradually reveals a frightening portrait of Philippine society. The film’s crime-ridden environment, poverty and kapit sa patalim mentality are not presented through grand exposition but emerge from the way these two men understand right and wrong.
That Catholic context adds another intriguing layer. This is a priest who has devoted himself to the Church and its people, sitting inside a taxi with a man whose own life is defined by another form of service and survival. Both men wear masks, and the more they talk, the more those masks begin to slip.
The screenplay is smart enough to plant red herrings while making the audience increasingly aware of the driver’s hidden life. Santos is repeatedly judged for comparatively small transgressions — drinking, gambling, vices — and that judgment becomes increasingly ironic as the film reveals that there is far more to him than his priestly friend assumes. The ending may become predictable once the clues accumulate, but the route toward it remains compelling.
This is not a mainstream action thriller despite its crime elements. Its intentions are closer to art-house cinema, with the road trip functioning primarily as a vehicle for conversation, moral inquiry and social observation. The dialogue is intelligent without becoming preachy, allowing the country’s larger problems to emerge naturally from the characters’ worldview.
The insertion of Ricky Lee, however, feels particularly off and absurd, disrupting an otherwise intriguing experience.
Still, Tirik has much to say about the masks people wear, the values they profess and the compromises demanded by survival. Its execution may be rough around the edges, but its strongest weapon is its script, elevated by the natural chemistry and conversational performances of Nacino and Tena. It is a good film whose most interesting journey happens not on the road, but inside the moral territory its two characters are forced to confront.
Cinemalaya 22 runs until 18 August at Red Carpet Cinemas in Shangri-La Plaza, Gateway Cineplex 18 and select Ayala Malls Cinemas.
