Leonor Will Never Die

With its low-fi pleasures of see-through ghosts and TV screens as portals, the film reaffirms how ingenious the medium can be in the grasp of the right artist. From one segment to the next, the mechanics of this adventure repeatedly astound us.

In a film steeped in loss and grief, Leonor Will Never Die, as the title implies, is ultimately a beautiful, life-affirming celebration of the power of film and art to heal. Yes, even ‘80s action films.

A sense of play and joyful collaboration permeates Leonor Will Never Die, even as it engages with serious issues of life, death, and legacy. It reminds us that love, like creativity, is a living thing, and that both are meant to be shared.

Escobar’s go-for-broke handling of the material favours fun outtakes, flip humour and nostalgic hat-tips to the days when the Philippines had real gravitational pull as a hub for maverick genre enthusiasts wanted to parlay the beautiful/desolate surroundings into their scuzzy opus. And just when you reach the point where you think that Escobar has finally lost the plot, she crops up on camera and admits just that.

The self-referential material and multiple-threaded storylines tend to overstretch greater narrative. Yet Leonor plays with interesting blends of reality and fiction, borrowing from Filipino action influences to create a potent concoction of how inspiration might strike a writer’s creative impulses.

The film builds everything up just to smash it and laugh, like a kid playing with LEGO.

Francisco’s committed and surprisingly nuanced performance makes it easier to invest in the movie’s otherwise unexplained style of magical realism.