This That and Everything In Between Review
Director: Cholo Laurel
Date Created: 2026-08-14 02:40
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This That and Everything In Between Review: Directed by Cholo Laurel and written by Cody Abad and Shania Sumergido, Netflix’s Filipino drama Ganito Ganyan Ganoon stars Jodi Sta. Maria as Joanne, Agot Isidro as Paz, and Gabriel Lazaro as Mattias, alongside Gardo Versoza, Ruby Ruiz, RK Bagatsing, Mitch Valdez, and others. Running for 1 hour and 53 minutes, the film brings together a family drama, a complicated mother-daughter relationship, grief, and the uncomfortable consequences of years of emotional distance.
This That and Everything In Between Review
Netflix Filipino film This That and Everything In Between revolves around Joanne, nicknamed Jo, a very accomplished television and film scriptwriter who is all set to depart from the Philippines to New York because of a great fellowship opportunity she got. However, things take an unexpected turn when suddenly Jo gets her mother, Paz, back in her life, whom she had not seen for 27 years. The situation gets more tangled when Jo finds out that Paz has a son named Mattias, a 20-year-old boy Jo doesn’t know anything about. What seems like a forced family meeting turns into something much deeper, involving past hurts, mental illness, a hidden truth and resentment.
The thing that I enjoyed most about Netflix’s This That and Everything In Between was the fact that this film does not make Jo and Paz’s relationship comprehensible. It is very possible that the filmmakers could have made the film focus on the archetype of the absent mother figure that returns and expects forgiveness, but this film is far from being just that. Paz has made some really bad decisions in her life, but I am provided with enough information regarding her background to understand that this is a woman who has made the decisions that she has to live with.
Without question, Jo is the character whom I related to the most. Jo is not portrayed as someone who has recovered from her troubled past just because she was able to build a career and attend therapy sessions. The frustration that Jo holds for Paz is genuine and not constructed for the sole purpose of generating some plot conflict. Jo has managed to survive all these years on her own after the departure of her mother, and the appearance of Paz and her attempt to reunite with Jo as a loving mother-daughter pair has naturally caused Jo to be frustrated.
Jodi Sta. Maria’s acting is one of the reasons why the Netflix movie This That and Everything In Between works. She doesn’t have to make every altercation between the characters a scene of screaming at each other. There are instances where it is Jo’s silence that carries more weight than the dialogue she speaks, especially in instances where Paz wants to take a place that Jo no longer needs in her life. I also liked how the movie makes it possible for Jo to leave whenever things get too much.
Paz is just as complex a character through Agot Isidro’s portrayal. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Paz, nor do I believe that the film is trying to have me. It was her past as a mother and her motivations for leaving that made her complex in such a way that it could not be justified by a single explanation. The relationship between Paz and Matti is yet another element that makes her complex since it’s obvious that she knows how to mother in ways that Jo doesn’t.
Then there is Matti, whose presence ultimately becomes one of the aspects that I enjoyed the most about the movie. His appearance could have served as an easy tool for adding to the conflict between Jo and Paz, but the importance of this character in the film increases little by little. Matti is not just a son of Paz; he is a symbol of Jo herself. Both of them have experienced different forms of emotional void throughout their lives. Jo has her anger and sense of self-reliance, whereas Matti is dealing with some psychological issues.
Jo’s professional life seems to be very much intertwined with her emotional one, too. She is not merely a heroine whose job is described as a subtext. Writing turns into a means for Jo to cope with all that is going on in her life. The idea of a story about a sister looking for her brother assumes an entirely new meaning after Matti comes into Jo’s life. In such a way, the creative side of the movie seems to be closely linked to Jo’s personal transformation and not just another subplot.
However, there is still a certain element of exaggeration in the way the movie tends to get melodramatic. Sometimes too many problems come together at once, making the story somewhat overburdened with abandonment, illness, mental disorder, parental expectations, love, and Jo’s career. Some secondary relationships could have been a little bit less crowded.
Nevertheless, it is the emotional reward derived from the notion that this is not really a tale of everything being fixed. The movie is about gaining an understanding of people when all this time you could not understand them. Jo does not forget what Paz has done, and neither does Paz instantly turn into a mother Jo wished to have. Here, the movie poses a question about whether two people can recognise their mutual destruction while still discovering some kind of love in their hearts.
This is why I left the Filipino movie This That and Everything In Between emotionally engaged with it despite not having such expectations at first. The movie is quite messy, at times too dramatic, and certainly not a perfectly crafted family drama, yet the characters bring some authenticity to it. What I liked most about it was the complicated process of Jo’s healing.
Netflix This That and Everything In Between Review: Summing Up
Overall, the most powerful parts of This That and Everything In Between are those which do not contain major epiphanies but, on the contrary, reveal how Jo starts gradually understanding that family could come in unusual ways. The appearance of Matti makes her see what kind of mother she had never realised before. Meanwhile, the return of Paz makes her realise that all her buried feelings could resurface unexpectedly. The film tells a story of grief, disappointment, forgiveness, and connection, even if there is little time to build it.
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