Verdict

After winning several major festival prizes for his short films, 25-year-old Filipino writer-director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez used real-life stories as a basis for his extraordinary debut feature. Verdict opens with Dante (Kristoffer King), in an alcohol-and-drug induced frenzy of jealousy, brutally beating his wife Joy (Max Eigenmann). After escaping to the police and having her husband arrested, she enters the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the overtaxed justice system in the Philippines. Gutierrez and cinematographer Joshua Reyles film in sinuous and long hand-held takes, bringing to life a world of teeming streets, cramped courtrooms and shack-like homes with uncanny vividness. Eigenmann’s nearly silent, stoic endurance and King’s toxic blend of aggression and childish self-pity give the protagonists a remarkable specificity. Gutierrez endows a stark, unsentimental story with surprising tenderness, richness and depth. (Telluride Film Festival)