Where The Night Stands Still (Come la notte, 2025) ‘Berlinale’ Movie Review: A Spare Reflection on Displaced Belonging

Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where The Night Stands Still (Come la notte, 2025) opens with an extended shot of a woman rigorously cleaning a house. It’s a canny choice, reinforcing the settled image of the protagonist, Lila (Tess Magallanes) in the role of a house-help. Her situation has dramatically changed, however, when we enter the film. The Filipino immigrant has inherited the vast house of her Italian boss, Patricia. So, she’s come into unexpected wealth and uber comfortable lifestyle. Everything is transferred to Lila. But has Lila learned to fully lean into it, embrace it as her own that she can view legally hers alone?

Sadness, a lack of possession drapes itself around the lives of immigrants. The plot shifts into motion when Lila’s siblings, Manny (Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr) and Rosa (Jenny Llanto Caringal), drop by and visit her. There’s a decay that immigrants try to stave off. Is this the illusion of a better life? What is it if not a temporary fig leaf of just a dream? Does assimilation come about with harmony and balance and not violent erosion? How does one move on and reconstruct their identity in a land away from their roots? The film stares into the chasm created by the trajectory. What are the losses that accrue in the process, the shape of stubborn hope?

The film threads together conversations borne of despair, regrets, and disillusion. Siblings reassuringly ask her if she’s doing well. How is she managing all by herself at the vast estate? Isn’t it terribly unsafe, and isolating? She must be pining for the comfort and warmth of her family and loved ones back in the Philippines. There’s so much she could have if she stayed back or moved in.

Being abroad, removed from any familiar face, she has to reckon with the solitary pangs of displacement. We are also taken through glimpses of a rocky past, the life with her family she left behind in the Philippines. She had a tough upbringing and fled to carve out a life on her own terms. As the three siblings lounge in the garden, resentments and tiffs seem to break out, long repressed. A conversation is broached. There’s so much that has to be confronted in all its ugliness and woeful reality.

Where The Night Stands Still (Come la notte, 2025) — A still from “Where The Night Stands Still” (*Come la notte*, 2025)

The siblings also speculate on her true relationship with her late employer. Could it have been a deeper, far more intimate one, beyond the stated dynamic? She confesses to not quite being at home and anchored in the estate. She can’t move through it with freedom and perfect, guilt-free mobility. Yet she feels inordinately tied to the house. She struggles to claim it as her new home that wholly belongs to her. She chafes at their advice to sell it off. Lila emphasizes being obligated to its owner, the implicit vow made between them. She can’t just shuffle it aside. It’s a binding bond lasting beyond death. But what of sudden health issues? How can she cope with emergencies all on her own?

Shot in monochrome, “Where The Night Stands Still” weighs the shadow of exile. It’s very composed and sedate, quietly appraising the fallout of the immigrant’s constant economic dependency. Even when materially the circumstances may have swerved for the better, a sense of freedom of being is endlessly deferred. The ties that bind don’t easily loosen. Instead, it sinks deep. Cruz has great formal command over the framing, pulling us into the fold of his narrative with quiet confidence.

Though the film skirts a dense emotional interiority, it traces the dynamics with precision. A swirl of memories underpins the drama, that lurches to a shocker of a twist, insinuations of which are subtly laid out earlier. The film breathes softly through its buildup, resulting in a climax ringing with a sharp sense of inevitability. With a spectral presence, the past hovers, irrevocably shaping what’s to come as the narrative unfurls.