Leonor Will Never Die

Fiction and reality blur in this surreal comedy from the Philippines, which sees an ageing screenwriter famed for her action movies living out one of her own film plots after a bump to the noggin

Words: Ben Nicholson

It is commonplace nowadays to see films described as ‘love letters to cinema’, and Hollywood continues to indulge in self-referentiality as regularly as it always has. Few films of recent years, however, could be said to capture the full spectrum of cinema's potential power and inherent silliness with quite as much panache as Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Leonor Will Never Die. The film was an award winner at 2022’s Sundance Film Festival and arrives in UK cinemas on a wave of adoration.

The plot follows the eponymous Leonor Reyes (played wonderfully throughout by Sheila Francisco), who was, in her heyday, a screenwriter of pulpy action films. Now retired, she picks up bootleg DVDs and wallows in the nostalgic simplicity of the violent genre films of her past. Although she is clearly a good

Director: Martika Ramirez Escobar

Starring: Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabrera, Rocky Salumbides, Anthony Falcon and caring person, her adult son Rudy (Bong Cabrera) finds her absent-mindedness increasingly frustrating and struggles to engage with her about the death of her eldest son in a tragic on-set accident years earlier. That son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon), appears to Leonor and Rudy as a semi-transparent spirit who sits with them and discusses matters of the corporeal world.

As much as the film is an ode to Leonor, it is also an ode to a particular brand of trashy action film. One day, Leonor is hit on the head – by a falling television set, no less – and while lying in a coma in the hospital finds herself caught up in an unproduced screenplay that she’d begun decades previous called Return of the Owl. In this film, a hunky construction worker, notably named Ronwaldo (this time played by Rocky Salumbides), is a people’s champion who uses his fists to claim justice from corrupt gangsters and drug dealers.

Escobar and her production team do an amazing job of evoking the spirit of the retro action flicks that Leonor was once a leading player in. While the tones of the real and imaginary worlds vary significantly initially, their stories, atmospheres, themes of loss, family, and the power of cinema all coalesce eventually. As the film goes on, the boundary between the authentic and fictional universes becomes ruptured in multiple ways – characters stare at the camera, questioning the trajectory of the script – while those very definitions are themselves called into question.

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Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

As a result, Leonor Will Never Die blends the ridiculous spectacle of genre movies with the powers of cinema, as escapism and catharsis, and all the while a multi-layered family portrait gradually emerges in the background. This can make the film feel like it has some rough edges, but this very fact just elevates the charm of its retro stylings and its eminently loveable hero.

Leonor Will Never Die is released 7 Apr by Conic