‘Where The Night Stands Still’ review: Modest Filipino domestic helper drama is set in rural Italy

Dir/scr. Liryc Dela Cruz. Italy/Philippines 2025. 75mins

The tensions of exile and servitude are played out in deceptively low-key fashion in Where The Night Stands Still, an Italy-set Tagalog-language three-hander from Filipino director Liryc Dela Cruz. Featured in Berlinale’s Perspectives section, the film is finely acted, elegantly executed and seemingly undemonstrative, but its thematic density will leave audiences musing after a resonant open ending. Brevity and modest scale will make for limited exposure, but niche outlets should take to this showcase for a rising directorial talent.

Finely acted, elegantly executed and seemingly undemonstrative

Where The Night Stands Still is the first full-length fiction from Dela Cruz, noted as a gallery artist as well as a film-maker, and a sometime associate of Filipino  auteur Lav Diaz. There are echoes of Diaz here, not least in the long takes and use of fixed camera, as well as in Dela Cruz’s own high-contrast black and white photography. But this very succinct piece has its own feel and thematics – and a dramatic language with more than a touch of Chekhov, in its musing on an old order that is passing while its tainted legacy remains. 

The film begins with a close-up of a white-haired woman, Lilia (Tess Magallanes), shadows flickering over her face to the accompaniment of something that might be the wind, distant industrial noise, or perhaps a mental state manifested as sound. We see Lilia moving around the large house where she lives in rural Italy, first kneeling at a makeshift shrine in her bedroom offering prayers for her late employer Signora Patrizia; then strolling in the large garden, carefully sweeping leaves from a passageway (the time is apparently a sunny early autumn) and cleaning a staircase. Lilia now owns the estate, bequeathed to her by Patrizia, her employer of 35 years who died during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lilia nevertheless still considers herself duty-bound to keep the house as Patrizia would have wanted – suggesting that her state of servitude has only been extended indefinitely. 

Eventually Lilia, who is in her 60s, is visited by younger siblings Rosa (Jenny Llanto Caringal) and Manny (Benjamin Vasques Barcellano Jr). In the initially leisurely discussions that follow their arrival – including a 10-minute single-take scene over an al fresco lunch – the three talk about the past, Lilia’s recent life alone, their shared experience of exile (all three left the Philippines to work in Italy) and the possible future. Rosa and Manny are mightily impressed by the good fortune of their ‘Ate’ (big sister) but, it emerges, somewhat resentful too – notably Manny, whose employment history has recently been rocky. 

The drama plays out in a muted, strictly realist register, but Dela Cruz also places stylistic touches that introduce notes of dream-like ambivalence: notably, two shots of unidentified lights glowing hazily in the dark, with strange accretions of sound welling up in the background (Antonio Giannantonio’s elusive, textured sound design is a key element throughout). 

Taking its own slow-burning time to build, the film appears to be more an extended sketch of character relations than a narrative per se (the three actors, together with Sheryl Aluan, are credited with contributing to the story). It is only at the very end that a significant event occurs with startling abruptness – before a wordless, markedly theatrical final shot ends the drama on an interrogative note.

Dela Cruz’s own black and photography (he also acts as producer, editor and production designer) emphasises high contrast and careful, sometimes surprising compositions – notably a semi-abstract shot from above, as the brooding Manny walks past a strange, seemingly ceremonial circle of white stones. Closing with a dedication to the global multitude of domestic workers from the Philippines, the film is informed by the legacy of colonialism. But Dela Cruz’s decision to dramatise the theme in such a low-key, even visually lyrical fashion makes it all the more troubling for the understated tremors of unease it creates.