2026 San Diego Asian Film Festival
From her debut work in the early 2010s to now, one can trace a strong line throughout the rising career of Filipino filmmaker Isabel Sandoval as she grows more confident behind the camera and gets access to more resources. Every Sandoval work feels unique within her filmography, with the filmmaker jumping between different expressions of culture and identity with an equal lack of fear of jumping between genres and styles. Her newest film, Moonglow, returns the director to the setting of the Philippines during the 1970s, almost a decade into the time of martial law imposed by Dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The film opens with Dahlia (Sandoval), a police detective with a close relationship to Chief Bernal (Dennis Marasigan), breaking into the Chief's house safe and stealing the cash from inside. Convinced it is an inside job, Bernal teams Dahlia up with his nephew, Charlie (Arjo Atayde), to find out who is responsible. Once a promising police detective himself, Charlie has been away in the United States and is now not only forced to confront the state of his home country, but also his former relationship with Dahlia.
Moonglow is a film that is impossible to label. The film takes the construction and style of a film noir, but does so with a color and romanticism not normally seen within the genre. Perhaps more accurately, the film feels like a ghost story — Dahlia herself even refers to Charlie as a ghost that has been conjured back to the world of the living. While the main narrative of Moonglow takes place in 1979, the film's spirit is pulled between the years both before and after Dahlia's crime. The film is one defined by the ghosts of yesterday. Dahlia and Charlie are forced to digest the love they shared for each other and why things could not work out between the pair. There is an infectious intimacy to the scenes that Sandoval and Atayde share, creating an electric spark of connection that is undeniable and sensual. For both Sandoval as a director and Isaac Banks as a cinematographer, this is some of the strongest work of their careers in terms of emotion and mood.
The story of Dahlia and Charlie is also one tied to the hopes and dreams of their home country. There was a hope for change and justice that slowly got morphed and taken over by corruption. While Charlie fled the issue, Dahlia stayed and has been forced to become a participant in the destruction of the country's morals. One gets the sense that Dahlia once wanted to fight for what she believed in, but time and circumstance have complicated that impulse. Sandoval's political voice is clean, never making the politics of the Philippines the main identity of her project while also naturally injecting it into nearly every scene. In a standout sequence, the film transitions from a conversation in the film's past, where the newly elected President of the country is giving a speech about his hopes as a leader, to scenes of a drive through the Philippines today. Sandoval connects the lies and corruption of the past to the facade of today, adding another rich layer to the feature and its message.
On the surface, as a crime noir thriller, Moonglow is equally skilled. While the setup of the film's conflict feels quite standard for the genre, the film is able to draw out a tremendous amount of tension from the plot's game of cat and mouse as Charlie begins to suspect Dahlia is behind the robbery. The walls begin to fall down around Dahlia, with this dynamic pairing well with their shared relationship drama. By the end, the film has successfully hooked the audience, with it not being clear exactly how things will turn out. The film's conclusion is perfect for what it needed to be, both wrapping the noir story up in a satisfying manner and refocusing the film back to its more powerful emotions. Moonglow offers some of the best writing of any film this year, with the ability to handle these various identities without any issue of focus or pacing being remarkable.
Moonglow is a new level of work for Sandoval. Both as a filmmaker and a performer, Sandoval crafts a feature that is both engaging and satisfying, taking the best of crime noir and warm relationship drama and finding a balance that uplifts both sides. At its best, the film reaches for the kind of tonal control associated with filmmakers like Louis Malle or Wong Kar-wai, and the film earns the comparison.
