How do we choose to remember those who’ve left us? This is the central question in Leonor Will Never Die, a Filipino comedy-drama currently streaming on Netflix.

Veteran theater actress Sheila Francisco stars as the titular Leonor, a former scriptwriter lost in the doldrums of retirement. She’s barely present when her son Rudy (Bong Cabrera) reminds her to take care of herself, something that grows increasingly more important as he inches towards emigration.

The only thing that manages to shake her out of this rut is an ad for a movie scriptwriting competition, which may or may not have floated her way via the ghost of her dead son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon)—the film is ambiguous about whether or not the ghost actually exists.

Leonor promptly heads to her room and unearths an old, unfinished script she’d started on decades ago. It’s a film in the style of classic Pinoy action movies from the 70s and 80s, chock-full of references to icons like Fernando Poe, Jr. and every trope in the genre.

The lead character in her film, we learn, is also named Ronwaldo.

Leonor Will Never Die then takes on a more surreal tone as Leonor works on her script, eventually blurring the lines between film and reality. It becomes clear that the script was Leonor’s way of memorializing her Ronwaldo, turning the child she lost into the action star she imagined he’d dreamed of being.

But just as we are prone to editorializing our memories of the people we’ve lost, Leonor finds herself constantly rewriting her script. She struggles with the pain she puts the fictional Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides) through, and Francisco’s nuanced performance gives us the impression that she does this because she blames herself for the real Ronwaldo’s death. In writing this script, however, Leonor gets lost in the fantasy she’d created for herself, and loses sight of the very reason she started it in the first place.

“You’re exactly how I remembered writing you,” she tells the fictional Ronwaldo, in one of the movie’s most telling scenes.

As Leonor Will Never Die reaches its climax, the movie delves even deeper into its themes of grief, of letting go, and of remembrance. How do we tell the stories of those we’ve lost? How do our recollections change the reality of who these people were? At what point does it stop becoming about them, and more about us? How do we prevent our grief from taking over our own stories?

What is the best way to speak on behalf of our dead?

The movie, for all the potential weight of its emotions, manages to speak kindly to its audience. Despite its heavy themes, Leonor Will Never Die never loses its sense of playfulness. It laughs at the tired tropes of Pinoy action while remaining in deep reverence to what these films mean to Filipino culture. Salumbides especially delivers on this end, his remarkable versatility making the fictional Ronwaldo believable throughout Leonor’s rewrites.

Writer-director Martika Ramirez Escobar creates a masterful ebb and flow in the film’s pace, bringing out the bombast when it’s needed before settling into the necessarily quiet moments, throwing in the odd dance number here and there to remind us that camp can be honesty. As a result, tears can sometimes come out of nowhere for the viewer, while still feeling earned.

It’s as though Leonor herself holds your hand throughout the whole experience, letting you understand what she needs to tell you about loss while reminding you to hold on to the joyfulness of life. Her story is heavy, but it is told kindly.

And it is through this kindness that the film gives you the answer to its question:

How do we remember those we’ve lost? However they would have wanted us to.

Leonor Will Never Die participated in the World Cinematic Drama Competition of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival—the first Filipino film to do so since 2006’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros. It won the Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit. You can stream it now on Netflix.