What If Review: Directed by Emmanuel Quindo Palo and written by Mike G Rivera, the Filipino romance drama movie stars Alessandra de Rossi and JM de Guzman in the lead roles. Releasing on Netflix on September 7, 2023, the film has a runtime of 112 minutes, and also stars Chard Ocampo, Ana Abad Santos, Nicole Omillo, Angie Castrence in supporting roles.
The Viva Films and A World of Our Own production follows a pair of newlywed musicians who get stuck in a storm on their island honeymoon. Soon bombarded with hard truths, their love and marriage are put to test.
What If Netflix Movie Review Contains No Spoilers
What If Review
At the base of the movie, it’s been built up with talks related to marriage and the romanticised expectations that many couples get swayed away with before tying the knot, and how these baseless desires and ideas are far apart from the real image of a marriage. What If‘s tone and colour scheme give off sombre and solemn vibes right away. The island setting provides a broody enough set up, which only gets further depressively murkier when the storm strikes and the couple is caged in with nothing to amuse them except each other’s company, which at first again feeds into the fantasised bliss of their new relationship, but gradually takes mundane turns with the excitement withering away.
As far as the theme and the basic storyline go, they’re all very profound and deep themes to deal with, but the drastic switch in the characters’ bond from the blissful goodness to the mundane indifference is not poignantly felt when the shift actually starts to happen. Signs of their troubles arise early on, but they turn a blind eye to them as they don’t appear to be like emotional hurdles at all. In that way, the movie does a good job of conveying how these early signs are rarely noticed by couples until the pressing taunts around the same talk keep pressing again and again.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the shift from their happy life to an unfeeling one is barely felt because the momentum between the pair’s love or affection isn’t built up enough for the fall to hit crashingly low. Most of the credit for the same also goes to the lack of chemistry shared between the lead roles. Unfortunately, though Alessandra de Rossi’s heart-aching expressions travel across to speak for her case, JM de Guzman’s character steps up as a rather stale and unlikeable person, and not because he’s a bad guy, but because his acting merely stays on the surface and comes off as irritating.
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It makes their couple hard to root for, so when their marriage is on the rocks, it doesn’t hit you hard enough to break your heart. And it’s not even as if you root for them to break up, because after a point I just stopped caring for them completely. Despite the marriage dynamic being realistic with both of their characters having family members either fuelling one of their traumatic insecurities or the other pushing their buttons around the same talks that they just stop holding each other’s hand. But, these supposed family members rarely turn up, therefore it’s hard to weigh in the exact amount of pressure they’re pushing on to the couple through their words, or mere existence.
A good attempt is made into pushing how the idea of wanting to look perfect and presenting your life shrouded in perfectly filtered layers on social media furthers that pressure of keeping up the image of a “perfect” relationship when nothing really is. A lot of golden opportunities are lost in unravelling Alessandra’s deep character in pain that has a lot to say, whereas, JM de Guzman merely appears as a typical ever-holding a guitar type of a musician who barely seems to have a unique personality.
However, all these good representations just go down the drain because the couple never really tries to convince us of their deep love story to begin with, and until and unless we can connect with them, we can’t root for them either, which ultimately drags the monotonous boat down by the time we reach the end.
What If: Final Thoughts
Despite having a good concept and story about people to tell, the new Filipino Netflix movie turns out to be a snoozing fest in which the bland monotony of the act doesn’t try hard enough to win our favour and emotional interest.
What If? is now streaming on Netflix.
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