Next to directors — even ones touted as auteurs — actors remain at the center of every new movie. Very rarely do you encounter a screen title that doesn’t talk about its stars and how they disappear into their roles, so to speak. It seems the craft of acting will never lose its appeal, hence the yearly tradition of actor-on-actor conversations. Breakthroughs and long-awaited comebacks psych up the audience, not to mention hardcore stans, ratings and critics be damned.
At times, movie stars even command a work’s shelf life. Though in the case of local cinema, that’s only partly true in a year that’s still reeling from the drastic outturns of a pandemic. Box-office hits are few and far between; audiences in theaters continue to decline, while a new tax burden on streaming services will most likely trickle down to consumers.
Still, there is no dearth of big-screen performances that make moviegoing worth the effort. If anything, rounding them up here could be quite vexing. These performances do not necessarily mean that the films they are in are the best local cinema could offer this 2024. Nevertheless, it hacks through the windswept state of our lives; at best it feels spiked with folk magic.
Bullet Dumas
Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos
Best Picture winner at the QCinema International Film Festival, director Gilb Baldoza’s latest short finds indie musician Bullet Dumas in a star-making turn as the protagonist whose life-altering decisions hinge on the weather, hence the circuitous title. Dumas extends inner lives to Celso as a father, husband, and factory worker, who may or may not trade his own life for his family’s future — all of which exist in the entire wavelength of terrific. When Dumas defies the force of nature in a wondrous, magical-realist pivot towards the story’s coda, you feel like you could also command something as unruly as the sky.
Sid Lucero
Outside
Opposite actress Beauty Gonzalez in this post-apocalyptic thriller, Sid Lucero plays a patriarch who takes his family to a remote farm after a zombie outbreak. While viewers might demand a movie spiked with adrenaline and near-captures out of this, I see it more as a character study tapping into trauma and abuse, which would’ve busted apart without a committed, tremendous actor at the helm. It’s compelling to see Lucero be the gentle father he never had, then go sexily psycho and toe-to-toe with himself, while the world around him rots. Such a shapeshifter. This may not be as tour de force as his portrayal in Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan, but it is one viewers would likely revisit.
Jansen Magpusao
The Gospel of the Beast
In his second feature since John Denver Trending, Jansen Magpusao is keen on proving he’s way past a one-hit wonder. The movie plunges viewers into a hostile underworld that Magpusao’s Mateo, a teenage boy who kills his pal by mistake, soon has to embrace. What comes next is a vile and visceral descent into beasthood with Magpusao charging his acting with practical smarts and complexity that only time could refine, thereby lending his character’s coming-of-age its exclamation mark. By the end, Mateo’s innocence is totally snuffed out, and so is ours.
Hazel Orencio
Phantosmia
Despite the wealth of talent in Phantosmia — Lav Diaz’s eighth film at Venice, which tracks the story of an ex-sergeant (Ronnie Lazaro) forced to unearth his past following a recurring malady — Hazel Orencio somehow towers over it, delivering a work that may well be her best since Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon. Here, she’s a breakneck reversal of what makes a maternal figure great, peddling the body of her adoptive daughter (Janine Gutierrez) to men of a town that, under Diaz’s mounting, feels so bleak and antediluvian. She’s an archetype, a sourpuss beyond repair, and Orencio simply goes all in.
Sue Prado
Your Mother’s Son
In this May-December romance directed by Jun Lana, Sue Prado is in fact not a mother but pretends otherwise to trick her neighbors into believing that she’s leading a quotidian life with her “son” (Kokoy de Santos), who’s actually an ex-student she’s groomed. Prado as the figure of authority is absolutely riveting, and the movie rages with hormones as she nurses her public image while casting off that mask privately, much like Lydia in TÁR, or the monstrous Elisasue in The Substance. The wonders she mines in Your Mother’s Son should catapult her to the year’s best.
Marian Rivera
Balota
Marian Rivera’s role in Balota, her first lead at Cinemalaya, is one that’s designed to sap all of her mettle as an actress. Here, she has minimal makeup, opts out of doubles, and goes to epic lengths — including a manic sequence in the jungle where she guards a ballot box that her Emmy, a teacher serving as poll watcher in a riotous election, is tasked to do. Yet, she runs the emotional gamut playing this part, from farcical to mad. The film may lose its momentum, but she keeps hers. Rivera’s the heart of the movie, just as Emmy is the soul of the story.
