While doing some preparatory reading for our podcast discussion of Delirious, I stumbled across several reviews for Filipino comedy-drama Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago (literally translated as “Return of the Owl,” which is a few levels deep into the film’s ouroboros of references; we’ll circle back), released in the west as Leonor Will Never Die. Like Delirious, the film centers around a character who slips into a fictional world of their own creation as the result of head trauma, but the two movies are very different from that divergent point. In the 1980s John Candy vehicle, the narrative stays with Candy’s character inside of his fictional world the whole time, while here the world continues to march on while Leonor is trapped in her fantasy narrative and the film constantly cuts back and forth between her two realities, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) is a former action movie director who now lives a very humble life with her son Rudie (Bong Cabrera). It’s been a long time since Leonor’s heyday, but her work remains well-beloved enough that invoking her name is enough for Rudie to buy one more day to pay the electric bill, even if Leonor still forgets to pay the following day. For her part, Leonor seems to mostly live in the world of her imagination, spending her days buying comics from a child street peddler and thanking him for his movie recommendations and, later, zoning out so completely that she comes out of a reverie on the bus with some confusion as to how she got there. Leonor’s former partner Valentin (Allan Bautista) is a former action star now running for local office, and even though he and Leonor are no longer together, he assuages his son’s concerns about Leonor being taken care of if Rudie moves out. The viewer, however, knows that there’s more going on with Leonor than meets the eye, as we bear witness to her holding long conversations with the spectral form of her other son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon), who’s been dead for years. This comes to a head when Leonor reads about an open call for script pitches and she dusts off an old manuscript entitled Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago. 

The “owl”/”kwago” of the title is a reference to the owl tattoo of the film’s lead, which we see play out in Leonor’s imagination as she reads, edits, and makes new choices about the script. The entire film, both in “reality” and in the world of Leonor’s movie, is shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, but it’s still clear which “world” we’re in at any given time, as the reality of the film is shot, developed, and edited to pay homage to Filipino action movies of the late seventies and early eighties. The film’s lead is also named Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides), and he lives out a pretty straightforward narrative as a well-beloved, handsome, fit construction worker who is involved with a project that, unbeknownst to him, is being overseen by the corrupt mayor (Dido Dela Paz). When Film!Ronwaldo’s brother is killed, he seeks to find the men responsible and get his vengeance. It’s right around this time that Leonor opts for a smoke break, steps away from the typewriter, and is conked on the head with a television that has been thrown out of the window of an upper floor. From here, she becomes a character in her own story, wandering around Film!Ronwaldo’s nayon and meeting the characters there, all of whom are her creations. 

Within Pagbabalik, Ronwaldo finds his way to a gentlemen’s club where Isabella (Rea Molina) is a dancer, although her jealous boyfriend Junior (John Paulo Rodriguez) makes the job a pain. Junior turns out to be involved in the death of Ronwaldo’s brother, leading to a bar brawl that ends with Rondwaldo escaping, Isabella on his arm, as they go into hiding accompanied by Leonor. In the real world, Rudie is told by Leonor’s doctor, Valdez (Tami Monsod), that the older woman is in a form of waking dream, leading him to try and convince his father to help him finish making Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago in order to wake her up. This is where the film—the one we’re watching, I mean—really kicks into high gear. If you weren’t really sure if this was a magical realism narrative before this point, there’s no denying it now, as it turns out that Leonora is not the only person who sees the ghost of Real!Ronwaldo, as we see that his brother and Valentin also have conversations with his spirit, and by the end of the film, he even speaks directly to news cameras. 

There’s one particular part of the Pagbabalik script that we get to see four different versions of, and we don’t even really get the context until close to the end. When Rudie finds the script, he reads the lines from the page: “Just leave Isabella alone! You can’t force her to love a demon!” The scene then cuts to Rudie, in a presumed flashback in a well lit office environment, delivering those same lines.” Later in the film, when his father introduces him to a former associate of Leonor’s who is willing to make the film in order to help get her out of her waking dream state, the lines are read again, this time by an actor. Strangely, this reading adds the lines “Leonor, listen close! Go hide in the back, in the shed behind the garbage can. Block the gate, don’t leave that spot! I’ll take care of this.” Finally, we see this scene within the fantasy Pagbabalik world, spoken by Film!Ronwaldo, with the revelation that this line is being delivered while Leonor is present. It’s clearer, but still inexplicable; what Leonor does within Pagbabalik seems to affect her script in the outside world despite her inability to change that manuscript due to her coma-like state. Tracing that recursion further, the scene we saw of Rudie reading the script in flashback is actually Bong Cabrera auditioning for the role of Rudie Reyes. This isn’t just magical realism, it’s about the recursive relationship between fiction and reality, not just within the film, but within the rhetorical space that Leonor Will Never Die creates for the viewer. It’s mind-bending but also very, very fun. 

That malleable nature of film and fiction really starts to unravel (in a good way) toward the end. Transitions between “reality” and “fantasy” occasionally take the form of zooming in on a TV that’s being watched or ignored in the real world, which happens to be broadcasting the seventies-esque Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago starring Leonor. There are no scenes in the “real world” wherein we see Leonor and Valentin interact, but after Leonor loses consciousness, there is a not-quite-real sequence that consists of a series of still images of the two on set that is edited together like a recreation of a  missing scene, with dialogue from the two of them. At one point, when Film!Ronwaldo is chasing after one of the mayor’s henchmen and Leonor runs out of inspiration regarding how to end the scene, he is left standing in the middle of the street with no direction, looking up into the distant camera situated above and away from the scene and asking what to do next before breaking into a little dance. In the real world, Leonor eventually physically disappears from the hospital, with only the non-verbal street peddler noticing her appear on television and trying to get someone to pay attention. There’s even a scene where the film’s writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar, playing herself, discusses how to end the film with the movie’s editor, discussing what would happen if Ronwaldo suddenly appeared there with them. 

That’s not what my favorite thing about the movie is, however. The first ten minutes of this movie may turn some people off while they acclimate to the kind of movie it is, and I know that it can be a bit of a slog until you realize what kind of experience you’re in for. What keeps you engaged during that time and carries you all the way through is Leonor herself. Francisco is captivating and very easy to love from her earliest moments, and the way that the past events of her life are revealed to us over time are moving. When doing the standard post-watch discussion, I started to say to my viewing companion “My favorite scene was …” and he interjected “The one with the two moms? Yeah, me too.” The scene in question is one in which Leonor meets Film!Ronwaldo’s mother; the latter is the creation of the former and was clearly penned into “existence” during the time that Leonor was still actively mourning the death of Real!Ronwaldo and she wrote her grief into the loss of the latter’s other son. Film!Ronwaldo’s mother delivers a small monologue about the nature of her loss and her lamentations, and Leonor is clearly moved by this display, and then speaks about the loss of her own son. Not to get too pretentious about my own work here, but this was a very recognizable moment to me; all of your characters come from you, and there’s part of you in all of them, but they can sometimes still take you by surprise by saying something to you about yourself. It’s a small moment, but it’s powerful, and I was deeply moved. 

There are so many more layers to peel back about this movie, but I fear that saying more will spoil, or at least unduly influence, your viewing of the film, so I’ll stop here. Watch it as soon as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond