Empty By Design

By: Michael Sun Lee

Empty By Design is Andrea Walter’s feature film debut. The movie centers on Eric (Osric Chau) and Samantha (Rhian Ramos), strangers experiencing what it is like to be back home in the Philippines after being abroad.  Eric is in town for work as a stunt man on a movie and Samantha is back after college to help her sister Patricia (Carla Humphries) after their mother’s passing. Both characters feel a sort of a displacement or loss being back home as they silently question their feelings about it, an introspection of who they are now versus who they were before leaving their homeland.  The story telling style embodies how Eric and Samantha deals with it a bit differently.

Eric and Samantha have a couple of chance meetings in Manila as strangers and figure out that they used to be classmates. There is no sexual tension between the two, but rather there is a commonality of feeling displaced while having come back home.  They end up hanging out while getting acquainted with what they used to know about their former lives in the Philippines.

Eric has been away from home a lot longer and deals with his homecoming experientially, but no longer speaks the native tongue of Tagalog anymore.  Samantha seems to deal with her homecoming cerebrally and emotionally as she works on her familial and personal relationship.

Osric Chau and Rhian Ramos are natural in their roles and Andrea Walter’s direction allows them to reveal themselves quietly. There is an emptiness it seems within each of them and perhaps that is because of their own unconscious making. The look and sound of the city of Manila as the backdrop is effective and the supporting roles played by Carla Humphries, Chris Pang and Dante Basco add to the main characters’ internal isolation.  And Walter does a good job of not letting the supporting characters take away from the narrative’s focus.

Eric and Samantha’s perspectives of being back home has changed for them because they themselves have changed. This movie and its home of going back home and not feeling like you are home is something that is relatable to me.  But are there resolutions for this feeling of being lost between two places?  The film seems to provide no definitive answers for these characters as they are left to still deal with their internal displacement because it is what it is.  After watching this film, I did feel a sense of emptiness for these characters and for myself, but perhaps that is by design.