Some Nights I Feel Like Walking takes flight towards the end. Petersen Vargas’ fourth feature film is languorous in its exploration of grief, allowing its core to unfold through an unlikely band of outsiders who look to honor a dead friend’s request.
Some Nights is essentially a road movie featuring four sex workers — Uno, Bayani, and Rush (Jomari Angeles, Argel Saycon, and Tommy Alejandrino, respectively) and the new addition, Zion (Miguel Odron) — dealing with a friend’s death. Zion mentions that their friend’s last wish is to return to his hometown in Pangasinan. Now on the run, thus begins their pilgrimage of the soul, and this unlikely barkada of hustlers plumbs the depths of desire and madness.
The film is a new beginning for Vargas in many ways. First, it’s his “return” to his indie roots after a string of successful Star Cinema films, including A Very Good Girl (2023) with Kathryn Bernardo and Dolly de Leon starring in a diva-off as a movie, and Un/Happy For You (2024) featuring Joshua Garcia and Julia Barretto in a not-so-happy love story.
Despite cautious movie goers still on a post-pandemic streaming high and a release date outside of the Metro Manila Film Festival, Un/Happy For You became one of Filipino cinema’s few commercial successes of 2024, earning a strong P450 million. The film is Vargas’ third outing under Star Cinema productions. Vargas was shooting A Very Good Girl and Some Nights at the same time, though the latter still went through rounds of funding until it finally landed a slot in the edgy Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia.
It is worth noting that to some extent, there’s no large gulf between Vargas’ bigger works and his “indie” fare. Both his debut 2 Cool 2 Be 4orgotten and Some Nights are decidedly queer and somber, almost insistent in the way the milieu is navigated in the service of the story.
The same could be the case with his other films. Though they may exist in the Star Cinema parameter (templated arcs to appeal to as broad an audience as they can attract), Vargas still tells the story of people on the fringes. In An Inconvenient Love, Donny Pangilinan’s Manny is a trade union activist. In A Very Good Girl, Bernardo’s Mercy is at the hands of a megalomaniac boss. These are not just character attributes, but byways through which the story progresses.
Multi-Sensory Approach
In Some Nights, the storytelling is just a little more raw and personal — personal in the sense that Vargas has put in his experiences here as a queer boy looking for love and belongingness, and raw in the sense that the film unfolds as an exposed nerve, where feelings are immediate and urgent.
Vargas uses a multi-sensory approach in Some Nights to weave his story, with an immersive camera work by Russell Adam Morton (In My Mother’s Skin) that moves to put the audience in its place (watch out for that one-take sequence at the end, including a drag queen “oasis”), music by Alyana Cabral (Leonor Will Never Die, 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten) and Moe Cabral that switches between atmospheric and electronic, and the sound design by Eddie Huang (In My Mother’s Skin) that perfectly captures what it’s like to walk in Manila at night.
The filmmaker initially tested the nocturnal environment of Manila in his short How to Die Young in Manila, a sort of rough sketch for Some Nights, featuring Elijah Canlas and Kokoy de Santos. The night is an intersection of many things: the primacy of queer desire, which had to be hidden during these “ungodly hours,” the culture of cruising, sex work, and in 2016, the grisly campaign against drugs by former President Rodrigo Duterte, when bodies executed mercilessly were just dumped on the sidewalks.
Some Nights handles all of these in a story that could prove uneven if you’re looking to be anchored by a sense of direction. But it might just be the film’s primal offering: this feeling of unmooring until it releases us into a cathartic conflagration at the end.
This review was originally published in the second print issue of Rolling Stone Philippines. Order a copy on Sari-Sari Shopping, or read the e-magazine now here.
