User reviews

Nadine has come out as a really strong actress this year capable of turning a character into someone you'd be drawn into. She has this strong yet subtle way of making the audience believe her without her having to over-act her message. It was my first time to see Carlo Aquino act and wow he was so memorable! That scene of Nadine and Carlo in that magical forest from Maya's childhood was so entrancing that you'd actually start feeling your own heartbeat. It was so magical and heart-breaking that it makes you feel alive. I actually watched the film twice because it was really a beautiful masterpiece having an original concept and impressive casting.

Ulan is a story of love, but it is not simply about romance. Though it injects elements of magic realism, it faithfully mirrors the realities of life - and one such reality is that things do not always go the way we want them to. Maya deals with unpredictability by weaving her own stories and finding solace in the superstitions imparted to her by her grandmother. But as the film unfolds, so does her growth. She learns acceptance - of what she cannot change, of her true strength, of the extent of love that she is capable of giving to others and reserving for herself. So yes, Ulan is a story of love - but more than just romantic love, it highlights the power of self-love.

Bittersweet romance. Ulan shows, not just fantasies, but the reality of finding and losing love.

What I like most in the movie is the nostalgia it brings - the childhood that most Filipino kids have. It built Maya's character through the supertitious beliefs she was taught by her grandmother while growing up. The same beliefs she then held on as she went on with her life - her career and love life.

Maya (Nadine Lustre) is your typical protagonist, but in a good way. She is the girl who craves romance, who is fearless in seeking it, and is brave to accept and move on from the pain it brings. On the other hand, Peter's character (Carlo Aquino) left you with the hardest question to answer - choosing between the calling to serve and the woman you love.

Overall, the movie is pure passion, mystery, and art. The ending is tragic but nonetheless makes you want to fall or stay in love.

Ulan is not a romance movie. It is about love but it is against love. It is anti-romance. But it is romantic. It was grounded in truth and yet steeped in the supernatural that wound itself so intricately with the reality of the story. The film benefits from such a rich appreciation of magical realism which gave meaning to what otherwise would be a disorienting narrative flow. Magic and folklore are embedded in Maya's childhood, which I think speaks of a need to reconcile what is seemingly a conflicting reality with the stories we are told, and which to us, speaks just as much truth as anything science could explain.

The story somehow starts as a common experience in romance of the trials and errors as one journey in finding mister right. I do like the ironic twist of the plot. Also the pictures are great showcasing our beautiful culture in fashion and scenery. Even though the story keeps shifting in time it is well organized. Nadin grew as an actress by doing this with a different leading man. This movie is worth watching!

Ulan is a welcome treat to Filipino audiences who are looking for a new flavor on their usual local flicks as it mixes magic realism with romance. It is really beguiling. Backed-up by an extraordinary story and great screenplay, driven by solid direction and storytelling by Irene Villamor, amazing performance by Nadine Lustre and mesmerizing visuals by Neil Daza, the result is a peculiar yet hauntingly beautiful, and a fullfilling movie experience like no other. Poetic cinema at it's finest.

At first, I was really drawn with the film's use of magic realism and its elements thereof (as I've seen the full trailer of Ulan during a Captain Marvel screening last week) but it regrettably fell short of my expectations.

Importanty, it misses the point of such a genre and unlike its Latin American literary counterparts, it does nothing more but pick up bits and pieces of magic realism. For starters, it could've made a clearer and more consistent critique on Maya's upbringing and other sociological matters in the film in relation to her grandmother's stories. But this was sidetracked and the film morphed into a failed love story redundantly masquerading as a slice of life.

Even with the limited elements present, the film and its use of Filipino folklore is utterly stale, underdeveloped and two-dimensional. At best, it tries to intrigue the viewer of these local fables and their mythical origins but it nevertheless falls short on the execution-it gets confusing at times and lacks a coherent plot, conflict, and ending.

Nevertheless, I would still credit the producers for attempting to introduce a lesser-known genre in the local film industry and if there's anything I can praise the film for, it is perhaps its cinematography and excellent use of wide shots.

P.S. I found Maya's interactions with her boss at the publishing house corny at best and cringy at worst, particularly with the boss' redundant sexual innuendos and borderline creepy statements, such as his joke that Maya was taking him out on a date. It didn't help that her boss was twice her age and married.

The film was first presented as your not so typical love story, but falls under these minor segues that adds mythology and historical Philippine beliefs into the mix, which leaves the audience begging for more. The mixture of Philippine superstition and its symbolic portrayal through the films animation provokes the audience to keep on wondering how the film would all tie up together. The sequencing of the film was also a breath of fresh air in contrast to your run of the mill box office hits, which effectively captures the interest of the audience as the unravel the mysteries that the film has to offer one sequence at a time. To limit the film only to one genre would be to disregard the brilliance of the film of how not only was it able to incorporate romance into the film, but to actually complement it with thriller and horror elements, likening it to a happy accident. What is most compelling in this film is the political satire that it was able to discreetly insert while progressing the story of the film but somehow being able to integrate into the minds of the audience, the impact of the environment in this country. Finally, the personification of Philippine myths is what makes this film stand out as it brought out a sense of humanity as to the imagination of our Filipino ancestry that we are able to appreciate it more vividly than we would usually like. All in all, the film prides itself in the substance and the message that it seeks to convey to the audience and urges them to look beyond the surface and see the collateral beauty in the world

Bittersweet romance. Ulan shows, not just fantasies, but the reality of finding and losing love.

What I like most in the movie is the nostalgia it brings - the childhood that most Filipino kids have. It built Maya's character through the supertitious beliefs she was taught by her grandmother while growing up. The same beliefs she then held on as she went on with her life - her career and love life.

Maya (Nadine Lustre) is your typical protagonist, but in a good way. She is the girl who craves romance, who is fearless in seeking it, and is brave to accept and move on from the pain it brings. On the other hand, Peter's character (Carlo Aquino) left you with the hardest question to answer - choosing between the calling to serve and the woman you love.

Overall, the movie is pure passion, mystery, and art. The ending is tragic but nonetheless makes you want to fall and stay in love.

A whimsical childlike lucid dream felt by its equivalently colorful reality. Irene Villamor's masterpiece played with Philippine mythologies that surrounds the concept of "Ulan" dressed as childhood fantasy while unfolding a present timeline of its protagonist's tragic yet joyful conquest of finding true love.

In the film, Nadine's innocent idea of love is nurtured by her childhood beliefs on mythology and used it as a fuel for her enduring pursuit of happiness and contentment. It was presented in seamless jumps between nostalgia and the existing ordeal of repeating failed relationships.

It's raw and stylish production design danced well with its cinematography and music of presenting visually stunning sequences.

As the narrative progresses, Nadine's reminiscence is getting more surreal and intense, while the present arc is moving forward with realism and optimism - the space between the two timelines are getting larger but still linked and romantically fulfilling.

In her greatest ordeal, after various ballads and fairy tale-like romantic beliefs, the film showered the story with a striking and relatable authenticity and still manages to reach the peak of its established feel-good drama - that transformed rainfall occurrences into something to be celebrated and savor with delight.

One of the best local films of 2019 so far

Ulan offers something fresh and original to the local industry. Weaving elements of magic realism, environmental consciousness, and the quest for a "perfect" love, Ulan brings to the table a beautifully-told spectacle that defies genres and challenges the viewers preconceptions on how stories should be told.

From a very young age, Lustre's character Maya has been exposed to and fascinated about idealized love - that love of her long-gone parents, her superstitious grandmother, the tikbalangs, of a childhood crush. As she grows older and meets (and re-meets) potential romantic partners, she grows weary and cynical about her chances of finding this love she once believed is meant for her. And therein lies the issue - growing up in a household and in a country where love is probably the central narrative, is there really any way real life can measure up to the stories that have captured our collective consciousness?

The film subverts the tropes common in the romance genre, and in doing so leads us to a conclusion that the choice to love and to find love can never be the happy endings in fairy tales and the gimmicky resolutions in rom-coms. Instead, helped by the lens of magic realism and the philosophy of a perpetually melancholic woman, we find that we are simply products of the values and stories that we grow up with; to truly love is to surrender to the forces we cannot control and to create meaning with those that we can.

Love, then, is coming to terms with the fact that disaster can strike anytime; it is also the steps we make to become resilient and reduce the risks associated with acts of nature, as bluntly pointed out by the anthropomorphic typhoon in the film. It is also the choice to not take what we have for granted; accepting the offer to finally eat some thrice-heated adobo with family. It may also be the acceptance and self-love that is often neglected, and forgiving your younger self for creating standards that are impossible to surpass. All this happens in the background of rain - drizzling, pouring, thrashing, sometimes soothing - that creates an atmosphere of familiarity and contentment.

Ulan is one film that should not be missed - it is a story that pushes the boundaries of romance, coming-of-age, and self-love, in a package that showcases the strength of current cinema and providing hope for a future generation that pays close attention to the stories they give importance to.

My first reaction after watching Ulan was that it was like the critically-acclaimed movie, Pan's Labyrinth. Both movies show the wedding between fantasy and reality within the gaze of a female character, amidst the backdrop of the prevailing social realities. But Ulan is even closer to the heart because it touches on Philippine realties.

Ulan's narrative intertwines Maya's real situation with the mythical world created by the imagination of the young Maya. It shows the innocence, imagination, and hopefulness of a child and the sadness, horrors, and hopelessness of reality as then realized by the older Maya. While the young Maya can easily solve her dilemmas with a simple work of imagination - just transforming those bullies into eggs - the older Maya has to struggle. She has to deal with small paychecks, a sexist superior, and a disastrous lovelife. The great cinematography and smooth transitions between these two narratives have helped in the realization of this poetic vision of the filmmaker. Even with two different narratives, the film is still so coherent that no scene is wasted apart.

What I really liked about the film is how it tackles Philippine social realities. It shows state neglect. It shows how the effects of natural disasters are aggravated by the lack of preventive actions and mitigating measures by the government . That beyond these concepts of forbidden love and tikbalangs, these current realities our the real hindrances in the fulfilment of our dreams and fantasies - just as how this torrential rain, brought about by anthropogenic climate disturbance as lamented by Ulan, the mythical creature, has shattered Maya's hope for a happy ever after. What I don't like though is that in the end, instead of teaching us the importance of volunteerism and collective pursuits is battling these realities, it has somehow disintegrated into mere self-love - see how Maya just held hands with her younger self in the end.

Overall, Ulan is sui generis, a class on its own. It is beyond a fairytale. It is a poem and a piece of art. It pushes the viewers to look beyond its narrative and ponder on the meaning of every scene. It encourages critical thinking, which mainstream films would normally not do in fear of loss of audience and profits. It shows us that our typical romantic movies can be turned into a piece of art where every detail has its symbol and every scene has its interpretation. Above all, it somehow teaches us that amidst the grimness of our reality, we should not give up especially on our ideals.

Apart from the common comments of the movie being a love story integrated with Filipino culture, beliefs and superstitions, to me the plot of the movie was very predictable, and eventually dragging. However, despite my not so pleasant comment above, the movie is actually good, as compared to other Filipino movies shown in cinemas, especially during the Christmas season.

A main takeaway for me is how the movie packaged the concept of love into two distinct ideas. As mentioned in the movie, a person may actually either be "in love with another (referring to a particular person)" or be "in love with the idea of love." The 2nd idea actually is very helpful for those viewers who are in relationships and are not yet sure of what such relationship could bring. Such ideas dwells on a person finding happiness not because of the company or affection given by a specific other but rather just because of the general idea of being cared of. I wish future Filipino movies insert deep messages like this, and stray away from the stereotype plots which have stricken the movie industry of our country for many years.

The movie is amazingly perfect from start to finish! Must watch movie indeed. I hope to see more of this in Philippine Cinemas!