Cinemalaya 2025, Part 2: ‘Paglilitis’, ‘Raging’—Wounded, Defiant, Searching

(This is a continuation of my ongoing series on this year’s Cinemalaya full-length finalists. For Part 1, click here.)

If the first part of this series traced how history forgets, this second part looks at what happens when memory returns—too late, too loud, too painful to bear. “Paglilitis” and “Raging” share the same center of gravity: the pursuit of justice by people who no longer believe in it. Yet they approach that wound from opposite directions. One insists on explaining everything, the other strips language down to the bone. Where one confuses catharsis for closure, the other understands that recovery is often quieter, lonelier, and far more uncertain than we’d like to admit.

To watch these two back-to-back is to see how tone can shape empathy. “Paglilitis” builds its outrage around the noise, while “Raging” finds its moral clarity in silence. Both films speak of survival in a world that rewards the loudest voices, but only one trusts stillness enough to let it say something. Between them lies the uneasy truth that justice isn’t always loud, and healing rarely comes with applause.

‘Paglilitis’: #Justice, Trial by Timeline, and the Price of Speaking Up

There’s a version of “Paglilitis” (lit. “A Trial”) that could’ve been quietly devastating. In fact, the setup is ripe for it: Jonalyn (Rissey Reyes-Robinson, in what should be a breakout performance) accuses her boss—the smug CEO of a milk company—of sexual harassment, only to find the system, and the people around her, grinding her down.

Two years after her firing, Jonalyn is still in limbo, working remote gigs when her family fields calls from a celebrity lawyer (Eula Valdez) who sees the case less as advocacy than opportunity. When the accused dies even before a formal complaint is served, the public sympathy shifts overnight: the dead man forgiven, the woman condemned.

Cheska Marfori’s direction shows a filmmaker who understands trauma as a slow corrosion, not a spectacle. She allows long pauses, lets her lead sit in silence instead of screaming. In those early passages, “Paglilitis” recalls the restraint of Belkıs Bayrak’s “Gülizar”: both films centering not on the assault itself but on what it takes to live after. Marfori is at her sharpest when she lets the camera linger on Jonalyn’s detachment—the half-steps, the curt replies masking anger that can’t find a safe outlet. Reyes-Robinson handles it beautifully; her performance suggests a person folding and unfolding within the same frame.

Processing Trauma in the Age of Social Media

If the film falters narratively, it finds sharper footing sociologically. Within this vein, what the film does capture incisively is the volatility of public empathy in the age of social media. “Paglilitis” understands that justice today isn’t argued in courtrooms alone—it’s trial by timeline.

The film shows how a movement can rise and crumble with the same algorithmic precision, and how the collective rage that once rallied behind Jonalyn is just as easily weaponized against her. With one death, one headline, content creators spewing hot takes for engagements, the tide turns. It’s a devastating portrait of how narratives are gamed, of how power recalibrates itself by appealing to “decency” and “forgiveness,” while the survivor’s voice gets drowned out in the noise of performative empathy.

That’s the most chilling thing about “Paglilitis”: not just that Jonalyn might lose her case, but that she’s erased from her own story. In a culture where virality masquerades as validation, the film shows how something as harrowing as sexual assault becomes public property, a moral battleground for those who were never in the fight to begin with.

When a Well-Meaning Intent Ends Up too Televisual

But just when the film begins to find its rhythm, it loses nerve. Instead of committing to Jonalyn’s inner world, Raymund Barcelon’s screenplay starts padding itself with clichés and dialogue that feel airlifted from primetime television. Then comes the ending—an abrupt cue to title cards summarizing statistics on workplace harassment. It’s the kind of move that feels well-meaning but evasive, like a filmmaker flinching from her own story.

The pity is that the bones were good. There’s a powerful story here about a woman confronting a justice system (and a culture) that confuses exposure for closure. Marfori’s empathy for her protagonist is never in doubt, but the film’s structure betrays her. By the time the closing facts appear, what could have been an indictment of institutional rot becomes a PSA about it. “Paglilitis” wants to speak truth to power, but it ends up whispering statistics to the choir.

Grade: C-

‘Raging’: Silence, Survival, and the Storm Within

Ryan Machado’s “Raging” is everything “Paglilitis” isn’t: quietly assured, formally daring, and emotionally devastating without ever needing to shout. Set sometime in the late-1990s, the film follows Eli (Elijah Canlas), a withdrawn young man whose days blend together in the sound of his own voice played back on a Walkman. “It’s been 29 days,” he says in one of such recordings. “Still the same. Still heavy.” The phrase becomes a pulse, a small act of control against something that refuses to be named. Machado doesn’t rush to explain it. He allows the unease to accumulate until the viewer begins to recognize that what’s haunting Eli isn’t a ghost story, but memory itself.

What the film gradually uncovers is a portrait of trauma that has nowhere to go. Machado’s Romblon this time is a stark difference from his previous film “Huling Palabas.” In “Raging,” Romblon isn’t a picture-postcard town but a living pressure cooker: mountains that hold secrets, rivers that cleanse yet never purify. When Eli reports seeing a plane crash in the distance, no one believes him. The mayor dismisses it, the townspeople laugh it off, and his only friend, Jopay, tries to protect him from the gossip that follows.

It’s through these casual cruelties that the film reveals the deeper tragedy—this isn’t the first time Eli’s truth has been denied. The “crash” is a metaphor for something much closer: the night a friend betrayed him in the worst possible way. The community’s disbelief is not new; it is cyclical, a form of silence disguised as civility.

On Depicting Quiet Rage

Machado’s approach recalls Jeff Nichols’ “Take Shelter,” where a man’s private anguish becomes a public spectacle of disbelief. Both films root their dread in realism, letting paranoia bleed into parable. But where Nichols builds storms on the horizon, Machado keeps his within—the downpour never comes from the sky, but from the soul.

In tone and pacing, “Raging” also evokes Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist,” in how it treats nature as a living reflection of human unrest. The rustling trees, the water’s insistence, the hum of a storm waiting to break—all mirror Eli’s slow and painful reckoning.

Canlas plays Eli with a quiet suffering that feels both internal and universal. His body language does the heavy lifting—the hesitant steps, the clenched jaw, the compulsive bathing that borders on ritual. Each gesture suggests a man trying to wash off what can’t be erased. Machado and cinematographer Theo Lozada refuse to frame him as a spectacle of pain. Instead, they keep a respectful distance, observing him in long, static shots that capture the isolation of trauma within a culture that has no language for it. The result is not detachment but intimacy, the kind that comes from truly being allowed to look and listen.

One of the Best Films of This Year’s Cinemalaya

What’s most affecting about “Raging” is its refusal to dramatize violation. There are no flashbacks, no speeches, no attempts at forced catharsis. Machado instead builds meaning through rhythm and repetition: the sound of running water, the low hum of a tape being rewound, the persistent weight of routine. In his hands, recovery becomes an act of endurance. The rage the title promises is not fiery or theatrical—it’s slow, tidal, and deeply human. When Eli finally confronts his demons under the pounding rain, the scene plays less as vengeance and more as release. The violence feels incidental; what matters is the recognition of what has been lost.

The film closes with Eli bathing in the river as daylight breaks. For the first time, despite the strong current, the water feels still, the young man’s movements unhurried. The act is both cleansing and defiant: an ordinary gesture turned into a prayer. It’s one of the most haunting endings in this year’s lineup, a moment of grace earned not through spectacle but through stillness.

Where “Paglilitis” mistook volume for urgency, “Raging” finds eloquence in restraint. It trusts silence, trusting that pain does not need explaining for one to feel it. Machado’s filmmaking underscores intuition and patience, with Lozada’s camera exuding humidity and hush, and the sound design swelling and ebbing like conscience. Some viewers may find its pacing glacial, but those who surrender to it will discover something rare in local cinema: a story about male vulnerability told with empathy instead of pity. It’s the quietest film of this year’s Cinemalaya, and perhaps its loudest in impact.

Grade: B+

Watch out for the part 3 of our Cinemalaya 2025 coverage.

‘Paglilitis’ and ‘Raging’ will screen and compete at this year’s Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, which runs from October 3 to 12, 2025. Follow us for continuing dispatches, reviews, capsules, and wrap-ups.