‘Moonglow’ review: Isabel Sandoval directs and stars in underpowered Filipino neo-noir

Dir/scr: Isabel Sandoval. Philippines/Taiwan/Japan. 2026. 108mins

Nearly seven years after her last feature, the New-York-set drama Lingua Franca, Isabel Sandoval returns to her native Philippines with a film noir that does its best to coast along on sheer smoky atmosphere. An opening caption sets this story of a disillusioned police office orchestrating a heist in Manila in 1979, during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos senior, when martial law was in force and corruption was rife. But aside from two brief radio news items, allusions to a toxic real estate development, and a general sense of malaise, there’s little attempt to take the pulse of the country at large. 

More interested in simmering passion than suspense

Sandoval casts herself in the lead opposite Arjo Atayde – a Filipino TV star and current congressman in the government presided over by Ferdinand Marcos junior – and that will no doubt generate media interest within South East Asia. Elsewhere, the pairing may seem odd, as there’s a distinct mismatch between the underplayed performance of Atayde and the tragic fatalism Sandoval brings to her role as a woman caught between a crisis of conscience and the rekindling of an old romantic flame. Premiering in the Big Screen competition at Rotterdam, Moonglow should garner further festival berths based on Sandoval’s solid track record, but its chance of wider distribution rests mostly on the novelty of its status as a Filipino neo-noir.

Sandoval is Dahlia, a trusted lieutenant of police chief Bernal (Dennis Marasigan), whose smoothly avuncular manner and cozy rapport with Manila’s political establishment flag dark undercurrents. In a page from the Hitchcockian copybook, we know from the get-go that Dahlia is the perpetrator of a robbery which her boss asks her to solve – pairing her in the investigation with his nephew Charlie, played by Atayde. Cue one of several glossy flashbacks to a gala event held 12 years previously, when Dahlia and Charlie were lovers.

Bespectacled and faintly nerdish, Charlie is a lawyer who has put his career in the States on hold to care for his ailing father. There’s plenty of dramatic potential in his gradual realization that his fellow investigator and former squeeze is in fact the chief suspect – a potential made richer by the revelation that she was motivated by a Robin Hood mission to right the wrongs done to Manila’s downtrodden slum dwellers.

Yet Moonglow is more interested in simmering passion than suspense. Its odd pacing, in which bursts of action are interspersed by long pulls on the narrative brake, is mirrored somehow by the bizarre decision to bring the film’s title up on screen exactly halfway through. That does seem to act as a stimulant, however: the film’s second half has a little more zing than the opening section, as the wheels of the plot force the characters into packing heat and working up a sweat.

A crane shot up to the dawn glow of downtown Manila followed by another down though a canyon of brutalist tenements is one of several cool style moves in a film that gets impressive mileage out of Sandoval looking fatale amidst clouds of cigarette smoke. Keegan Dewitt’s spare, echoey, jazzy soundtrack folds atmospherically into a sound design that creates a muffled, protective cocoon around the central story.

It’s just a shame that story is under-fuelled and over-full of the sort of lines we thought had gone out of fashion. Hearing music playing in the background as she talks to Charlie on the phone, Dahlia really does say “It’s… it’s that song”. In a film that includes two visits to the cinema and other filmic references, this embrace of genre cliché might even have worked to give Moonglow some meta-cinematic resonance. But the tone is relentlessly solemn, the delivery uninflected.