Tatler: Movie review: in ‘Sisa’, Jun Robles Lana gives a madwoman her reckoning

 

Tatler: Movie review: in ‘Sisa’, Jun Robles Lana gives a madwoman her reckoning

By Angela Nicole Guiral

March 12, 2026

 

Set inside an American-run camp during the Philippine Revolution, ‘Sisa’ by Jun Robles Lana places women at the centre of a story usually told through soldiers and generals (warning: spoilers ahead)

 

After Jun Robles Lana’s recent success with Call Me Mother, the director has returned with a film that is a lot more unsettling. Sisa unfolds during the waning years of the Philippine Revolution, when the ‘benevolent assimilation’ of the Americans corralled civilians into reconcentration camps. Into one such camp wanders a woman whose origins remain obscure. The villagers, mostly widows, begin to call her Sisa, after the tragic mother from Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere.

 

Almost everyone who went to high school in the Philippines knows the name Sisa—a usual shorthand for maternal grief pushed to madness. Lana’s film takes that familiar figure and gives it a little twist. This Sisa, played by the returning screen legend Hilda Koronel, appears disoriented and fragile at first glance. The villagers assume the war has broken her mind. They do not suspect the secret she carries into their fragile community.

 

Sisa runs for close to two hours. A personal metric tends to surface when watching films nowadays: how often the phone appears during the screening. In this case, it remained inside the bag. The imagery pulls everyone’s attention. Some sequences feel almost painterly, the camp bathed in still compositions. Other scenes are more unstable. The jagged framing moves as though sharing the character’s mental state. Sometimes, it feels closer to psychological horror than to conventional historical drama.

 

Sound deepens the unease. Bird calls and ambient noises drift in, feeling strangely displaced. “The things that you can hear, they’re not from the Philippines—like the birds, they’re not native. The sounds are actually quite distorted,” shares Lana during a talkback session. “Because I wanted the audience to be like, ‘Is that a wig?’ Even Sisa’s wig sits between performance and artifice. It’s like a symbol—she’s carrying all her secrets in that wig. I want to have that hyper-awareness when watching the film.” Everything was intentional. “For a country that easily forgets, remembering itself is a form of resistance. And I wanted the audience to be part of that resistance.”

 

The same thinking shapes the film’s visuals. Aspect ratios expand and contract, occasionally resembling the boxed frame of early cinema. Night scenes were filmed during daylight, giving the darkness a faintly unreal texture. The seams are visible by design. Lana wants the viewer to notice them.

 

At the centre of the film stands Koronel. Her portrayal carries the weight of a performer who has spent decades shaping Filipino cinema. During the talkback, she explained why the role drew her out of retirement. “The script was fascinating,” she said with a laugh. “And I loved that I killed a lot of people here.” The line drew applause in a room full of Filipinos (food for thought: what would have been the experience with Americans in the same room?)

 

The ensemble surrounding Koronel includes Eugene Domingo, Tanya Gomez and Jennica Garcia, among others. Domingo brings a sharp, dramatic presence that many viewers already recognise beneath her comedic reputation. Garcia, meanwhile, holds her ground beside veterans, portraying a woman whose fragile romance emerges from fear and desperation. She explained during the talkback that she thinks her character, Leonor, genuinely believed Commander Harrison loved her. “I think that when you’re in the mountains, and you’re not mentally functioning well anymore, just a bit of care, a bit of food and safety given to you… It’s hard not to fall for someone.”

 

Violence appears in the film, though not in the way audiences expect. Lana keeps much of it off-screen. Instead of battlefields, the drama unfolds in kitchens and dining rooms, the domain of women, in most literature. “The battlefield happens in the kitchen. I wanted them to have power [there], in the dining room, using pots and these little things that we take for granted.” He also explained, “We don’t have to see the violence because I feel that you can see it in Sisa’s eyes. You can see the violence in how these women look at each other. So, there was really no need to show the violence.”

 

This shift in perspective becomes the film’s highlight. Wars are often remembered through generals and declarations. Here, the story belongs to women who would rarely enter official records. Women who are reduced to mere footnotes. Their lives reveal a harsher truth about occupation.

 

By the closing scenes, the name Sisa carries a whole new meaning. The wandering madwoman is so much deeper than what we initially expected her to be. Madness, in Lana’s telling, may be a disguise. Or clarity. Either way, the character emerges from the film with a presence that Philippine history rarely grants women who lived through its wars.

 

Link: https://www.tatlerasia.com/lifestyle/entertainment/sisa-movie-review-jun-robles-lana

 

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