Cinemalaya Review: 'Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam' turns a timely story into a dull drama
A timely story about HIV and stigma never finds the emotional urgency it needs.
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A timely story about HIV and stigma never finds the emotional urgency it needs.
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Director David R. Corpuz and writer Iar Arondaing have a potentially powerful vehicle for HIV awareness and stigma: a love story between two men. Love stories work regardless of gender because relationships are complicated, full of history, conflict and emotional baggage. Add a life-threatening illness, and there should be no shortage of drama.
Instead, this dramatically inert film feels like an afternoon radio drama stretched to almost two hours.
It has the trappings of an indie film: Adam Dumaguin’s grainy cinematography, prolonged silences and deliberately slow delivery. But the texture is not particularly filmic. It is simply grainy. The silences contain little, and the film seems to mistake slowness for depth.
The story centers on Bong (Miguel Odron) and Neil (Martin del Rosario), a gay couple whose relationship has remained private. The film opens with Bong already in a hospital ward, where his health continues to deteriorate. His illness and the couple’s decision to keep their relationship and Bong’s condition from others provide the film with its central predicament.
We get it. Yet the film keeps repeating it through the same lines and situations until the point becomes tiresome. Neil is trapped in a dialogue loop of “Paalam, Nay” and “Alis na po, Nay,” while different scenes and camera angles offer little dramatic movement.
Where is the argument? Where is the tension? Where is the stress that naturally comes when a couple faces a life-altering illness while one partner must keep the truth from everyone else?
Neil’s only real predicament outside the hospital involves his HR job at a call center and how to explain his absences. That hardly qualifies as conflict. The film spends nearly two hours circling the same information instead of digging into the messy reality of a relationship suddenly transformed by illness.
Here, the illness is sanitized. The film refuses to confront its frightening, exhausting and ugly reality.
Even the medical situation needed more clarity. Bong has untreated HIV and develops amoebiasis as his immune system deteriorates, yet the film does not adequately explain his treatment. If HIV awareness is part of the film’s purpose, the illness should not merely drive the plot. It should inform the entire drama.
That is particularly frustrating at a time when the Philippines faces a serious HIV epidemic. The film could have used its nearly two-hour runtime to explore stigma, secrecy, testing, treatment and the emotional cost of the disease.
Instead, awareness feels squeezed into a small portion of the story.
Sure, Del Rosario gives Neil the emotional dimension the script often lacks. But one strong performance cannot compensate for a film that keeps circling its subject instead of confronting it.
Tayo Lang ang Nakakaalam had the opportunity to make HIV, stigma, illness and love feel urgent and painfully human. Instead, it leaves us with a story that says it matters without making us feel why it does. With its glacial pacing, sanitized and glossed over characters, and repetitive dialogue, the real tragedy here is that it has so much to say—and says so little.
0.5 out of 5 stars
