QCinema 2018 | Oda sa Wala

The silence of the opening minutes of Dwein Baltazar's Oda sa Wala is telling. It helps us settle down into our protagonist Sonya's routine, and it establishes her utter lack of social interaction. Her loneliness becomes palpable, mirrored in the drab grays and browns of the frame. She is positioned at the center of the frame, but at the same time she almost blends into the picture, as if she wasn't there, like a walking ghost. The title, then, becomes accurate: an ode to nothing, to the invisible, to the unseen. In that case, it shares themes with another film I saw this year, James Mayo's Kuya Wes. But while that film dealt with its themes through romance and comedy, Oda sa Wala takes a wholly different route.

The film takes Sonya's plight and makes it more and more absurd by the minute. As the proprietor of a funeral parlor, she deals with dead bodies on a daily basis. When an unclaimed dead body lands on her doorstep, she starts talking to it, feeding it, giving it clothes. As it goes on, she gains more confidence to interact with other people. She begins to interact with the taho vendor that she has a crush on. She interacts more with her customers. Her father (Joonee Gamboa) even joins in with Sonya's plan. But what is happening here? Is it folie a deux, is something ghostly truly going on, or are we concerned with nothing at all? What is real, and what is not? Indeed, when someone remains unseen, are they even real at all? The film's ambiguity becomes its strongest aspect, knowing that for many viewers, genuine enjoyment stems from trying to put the pieces together long after the movie has ended.

Marietta Subong, 'debuting' here under her real name, emerges as a force to be reckoned with. She captures the pain of isolation and loneliness perfectly, and her performance here (along with her performance in Sol Searching) belongs among the year's best. A clever script also complements the story with humor, and Subong manages to make the most of it as well.

For all the film's absurdity, at its core we have a story of a woman whose only desire is to be seen and heard, an invisible shooting star in a dark sky, a moth drawn to a flame, ephemeral and short lived, bound by invisible forces wrought from culture and society at large that conspire to leave her behind. Though the film thrives in mundane affairs, there is magic between these frames, and that is why it is one of the year's standouts.