Leonor Will Never Die (2022)

"Life itself has its own life"

If you watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and thought it was overly simplified and spoon-fed its audience, Leonor Will Never Die might be the reality tripping, mind bending movie you want as long as you don’t mind a bare bones budget. Director Martika Ramirez broke the fourth wall and the 5th dimension.

Leonor worked in the movie industry until tragedy struck. Now ten years later, she and her son Rudy barely speak to each other and literally can’t keep the lights on in the house. She decides to dust off an old script and finish it hoping to help pay the bills. Before she can wrap the story up she’s hit in the head by a flying television and sent into a coma. She enters the world of her script and discovers the traumas she’s put her characters through.

The above paragraph sounds similar to other “entered a make-believe world” dramas and films we’ve all seen. Then Ramirez added a ghost that everyone could see, a pregnant man, and strange criss-crossings of realities. She even threw in a song and dance number. I’m not familiar with 1970’s-80’s Filipino action flicks but Leonor’s re-enacted film looked much like old Hong Kong films from the same time with the same chicka-bow-wow music.

I have no idea if Ramirez wrote this to speak about some deeper social commentary. Should we stop extolling violence to resolve problems, poor Ronwaldo was tortured by Leonora’s writing. Was the story a way for Leonor to work through her grief? I spent most of my time trying to figure out what was going on as the characters and story jumped from one reality to the next. At one point, when Leonora disappeared, the doctor told her son to not bother looking for her. She’d seen this kind of bizarre thing before when people needed to finish their stories. The doc looked at the distraught son as if to say, “Writers, am I right?” Martika Ramirez used comedy, violence, family, and supernatural occurrences to take a woman near the end of her life on a trip that could be described as a “dream within a dream*”--- especially if she’d had spicy food and cold medicine mixed with alcohol before bed.

24 August 2024

*Princess Bride quote and/or Edgar Allen Poe

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