REVIEW | In ‘Pinikas,’ paradise belongs to the outsider gaze while survival splits a woman in two

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/12 May 2026)— In the final moments of the Cebuano-language film Pinikas (2025), Maya disappears into the waters she spent much of the story fearing.

Directed and written by Pintuyan native Cris Fuego, Pinikas follows Maya, the eldest daughter of the Piit family from the seaside town of Pintuyan, Southern Leyte. After the death of her mother, Maya becomes the family’s breadwinner, supporting her younger siblings and her alcoholic, gambling father through the selling of dried “pinikas” squid prepared from the daily catch of Nilo, a local fisherman with whom she develops a relationship.

But the film quickly dismantles any fantasy that love alone can rescue people from structural poverty. Unlike the familiar logic of many mainstream Filipino romance films — where the poor heroine ultimately chooses “true love” over money — Pinikas recognizes that love is not always economically survivable. Maya loves Nilo, but she also understands that love cannot pay debts, feed her siblings, or pull her family out of poverty.

Maya sits before the sea in Pinikas, her figure nearly swallowed by shadow and water, as though she
herself had been cut out of the ocean. Screenshot from the trailer of Pinikas.

So when she begins speaking online with Luke, a Canadian foreigner willing to marry and financially support her, the film transforms from a romance into a portrait of a woman forced to split herself in two.

“Pinikas” refers to butterflied dried squid, sliced open, flattened, and exposed to the sun to dry. Maya, too, becomes “halved” — torn between emotional attachment and economic necessity, between the life she desires and the life that can realistically sustain her and her family.

What makes the film particularly effective is its refusal to romanticize either poverty or paradise. Pintuyan is visually stunning: surrounded by sea, washed in sunlight, framed by the kind of island landscapes that tourism campaigns often flatten into fantasy.

Yet Pinikas constantly undercuts this postcard beauty with scenes of debt, labor, bureaucracy, and exhaustion. For Maya, the sea is livelihood and obligation, danger and survival.

One of my favorite images from the film captures Maya looking out towards the sea, her body rendered almost entirely in silhouette against the water, as though she herself had been cut out of the ocean.

At one point, Luke marvels at the island’s beauty, a reaction that quietly reveals how paradise often depends on perspective. What outsiders see as escape, locals experience as precarity.

In another film, the island might have functioned merely as an exotic backdrop or aestheticized poverty-porn. Here, the island becomes inseparable from the material realities that shape its inhabitants’ decisions.

The film’s visual language mostly remains inoffensive and unobtrusive, leaning towards the mainstream style that avoids drawing attention to itself. But there are moments where a stronger authorial voice emerges. One of the film’s most affecting scenes comes when Maya desperately borrows money from neighbors, Nilo, and ,eventually, Luke to bail her father out of jail.

The confrontation that follows between Maya and her father is shot handheld, the unstable camera amplifying the emotional volatility and desperation that the film otherwise keeps quietly simmering beneath the surface.

Thematically, however, Pinikas becomes richest in its recurring imagery. In an earlier scene, Maya and Nilo ask each other what animals they would be. Nilo says he would be a whale shark; Maya says she would be a maya bird.

The exchange initially plays like flirtation, but the film slowly transforms it into something symbolic. Nilo repeatedly looks upward — toward rain, sky, wonder — while Maya wants to look downward, from the sky.

Near the film’s conclusion, Maya rides a pumpboat with her best friend Briana, a makeup artist who earlier encouraged her to seek a foreigner online. Asked what kind of fish she would be, Briana jokingly replies that she would be a “parrotfish-mermaid,” half woman and half parrotfish.

Maya and Nilo stand in the rain in Pinikas. In one of the film’s recurring exchanges about perspective,
Nilo asks her: “Well? Does this feel better looking down or looking up?” Screenshot from the trailer of
Pinikas.

When Briana asks Maya what her own bottom half would be, Maya responds: “I don’t want to be split in half.” Then she jumps into the sea.

The ending initially feels startlingly open-ended. Watching the film, one could easily read the scene as a tragic end; my mother, as the credits rolled, turned to me and asked: “Did she just commit suicide?” The film leaves room for that interpretation. But the longer I sit with the scene, the more its earlier images begin to resurface and rearrange themselves.

Nilo once compared himself to a whale shark, telling Maya that smaller fish — say, a maya-maya — could simply ride along its back. Earlier still, Maya confessed her fear of the sea, only for Nilo to reassure her that whale sharks do not bite.

In this light, Maya’s final plunge reads as an act of surrender, resignation, acceptance, perhaps even an attempt to finally enter Nilo’s world after spending the entire film unable to inhabit it fully.

The ambiguity works precisely because the film itself is about fragmentation. If Pinikas occasionally stumbles a little — particularly in its reliance on familiar stereotypes such as the flamboyant gay best friend, or in Nilo’s initially sexist characterization — it nevertheless succeeds in articulating something rarely acknowledged in mainstream Philippine cinema: that survival often demands the fracture of a person.

Made without major studio backing or Manila-based festival grants, Pinikas reflects the growing strength of regional filmmaking collaborations outside the country’s traditional cultural center.

Bringing together artists and filmmakers from across the Visayas and Mindanao, the film demonstrates how regional cinema can tell stories often flattened, romanticized, or overlooked entirely by Manila-centric narratives.

Crucially, Pinikas also reminds that the fantasy of island paradise and the hidden conditions of labor, sacrifice, and survival that sustain it are often inseparable halves of the same landscape. (Bea Gatmaytan/MindaNews)