The Time That Remains Review
Director: Adolfo Alix Jr.
Date Created: 2025-10-16 22:24
2.5
The Time That Remains Review: Adolfo Alix Jr.’s Filipino movie blends romance, mystery, and the supernatural, but fails altogether in its execution. The film stars Bing Pimentel in the role of Lilia and Matias being played by Carlo Aquino, along with Beauty Gonzalez, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Bembol Roco, and Mercedes Cabral in supporting roles. The movie clocked in at nearly 1 hour and 56 minutes, and it chronicles the love story of an older woman and her immortal sweetheart who have shared years of love in spite of the passion being forbidden. It should be a hauntingly beautiful tale, but where the promise was so great, the movie ends up dull and unbalanced.
The Time That Remains Review
The Time That Remains starts with a shocking moment; there’s an attack in the bedroom of an older woman, Lilia. Yet from the narrative that follows, we realise that this is no regular woman. She does possess a mystery revolving around her life, which spans decades. Her lover, Matias, isn’t a mortal man but an immortal being who can transform and feed on blood. He’s lived for centuries and can’t perish, while Lilia becomes older day by day. What they share in common is an unusual, loving, and hurtful relationship, and the very core of the film.
Initially, I thought the premise behind this concept was so rich. The premise of an ageing woman living with an immortal husband could have delved into such great things regarding the nature of time, the act of age, and how far the limits of love can take us. Too bad that Netflix’s The Time That Remains does not delve so far as it potentially can. The narrative becomes too stretched and uneven, and it can’t possibly decide if it should be a mystery, romance, or fantasy thriller.
What actually discouraged me was the movie’s processing of the supernatural aspect. Being a vampire should have felt brooding and allegorical for Matias, but scenes associating his transformation are hastily produced and almost laughable at times. Rather than evolving into something eerie and terrifying, such scenes take you out of the narrative. The tone oscillates uncomfortably from love drama and B-movie terror, and the incongruity does not allow the affective effect to take root.
The movie also attempts some Filipino myths, relating Matias to legends such as the aswang and the manananggal, but even that premise seems neglected. These are things that could have brought richness and a strong cultural heritage, but instead, they become background decor and not a substantial element in the story. For a movie about immortality, the movie, more than anything, lacks vitality.
What prevents the Time That Remains movie from being an absolute miss is its core emotion, the love affair that exists between Matias and Lilia. The humanness in the person of Lilia and the immortality in the person of Matias are in such contrast. She feels the anguish, the love, the loss, and the age, whereas he can’t age and can’t escape the memories. There’s something poignant about the silent melancholy in watching a love story where one can’t escape the terminal and the other can’t escape the loss. It’s that element in the movie that actually works, though the others can’t reinforce it enough.
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But the text always feels far too flat to carry such a gigantic affective burden. The pace flaggers, and the timeline skips at times, with more disorientation than empathy with the plot. The detective sub-plot revolving around Angua, the fanatical cop bent on proving the existence of Matias, could have brought tension, but does instead comes across merely as a gratuitous deflection. It distracts from the pivotal coupling and brings with it a level of confusion which does not amount to anything.
In terms of visuals, the style of the movie is extremely dark and foreboding, but the cinematography does not quite shine at all. Some parts are actually well photographed, such as the flashbacks, but some become too grainy in texture or too low-lighted in order to get a good view. Likewise, the score tries to create tension but ends up too repetitive and shrill at some points.
The conclusion does leave a scar, though. It brings the story back to its emotional core, concluding that even immortality cannot save you from a broken heart. That choice for Lilia to remain mortal and succumb to a human death seems symbolic, a choice for peace instead of eternal anguish. Matias’s last moment basking in the sunlight is poignant but also predictable. The movie strives to be deep, but having reached this conclusion so late in the movie, the majority of the feelings are gone.
I wished the director also had more confidence in the dramatic potential of the story and less in terror and mystery gimmicks. The love affair with Matias and Lilia could have powered the entire movie if more focus and reality had been added to it. The static scenes with them sitting in silence and simply conversing with each other, which carry more punch than all the CGI does, are the strongest scenes in the picture.
Netflix The Time That Remains Review: Summing Up
On the whole, Filipino film The Time That Remains left me in confused emotions. I enjoyed the premise, the attempt at connecting folklore and human feeling, and the bittersweet ending. But as a complete film, it does poorly in tone, in aesthetics, and in plot. It’s neither really a romance nor really a horror; it awkwardly falls in the middle and does neither.
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