A queer supernatural comedy-drama at Puregold CinePanalo turns one unfinished confession into a ghost story its lead actor calls autobiography.
Marcel dies in a college dorm room and comes back anyway, for one reason only: to finally say the one thing never said out loud while alive.
That’s the premise of “Multwoh (Patay na Patay Sa’yo),” one of seven features competing at this year’s Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival, the supermarket chain’s annual production-grant program that funds each of its seven finalists with ₱5 million toward an original Filipino film.
Directed by Rodina Singh for Spicy Mama Creative Studio, the film stars Sassa Gurl as Marcel opposite Joao Constancia, with John Lapus, Phi Palmos, and Mae Paner rounding out the cast. It’s a substantial ensemble around a premise that could easily have been carried by two leads and a special-effects budget for fog machines — the size of the supporting cast suggests Marcel’s death is meant to ripple outward through a whole circle of people, not just play out as a two-hander with a ghost.
“This Story Is My Lived Experience”
“This story is my lived experience,” Sassa Gurl has said of the role, according to the film’s own press materials. The framing she’s given the character in interviews pushes back on a narrower read of Marcel: that being queer isn’t the same as being defined entirely by which man does or doesn’t love you back. The film’s marketing describes itself, in its own words, as “a queer film told through the authentic voices of creators from the gay community” — a framing aimed at a specific kind of visibility, not shock value or camp.
“Multwoh” shares this year’s CinePanalo lineup with another queer story — “Patay Gutom,” another of the seven finalists, pairs a delivery rider with the ghost she falls for — but it’s the one built most directly out of its own lead actor’s account of her life, rather than an ensemble’s collective take. That distinction matters more than it might sound: a lot of queer representation in Philippine mainstream cinema still arrives filtered through a straight writer’s idea of what that experience looks like from the outside. Having the film’s own marketing lead with its lead actor’s lived account, rather than with the ghost-romance hook alone, is a small but deliberate signal about whose perspective the story is actually working from.
A Ghost Story That Isn’t Playing for Scares
Structurally, “Multwoh” sits in a genre that Filipino cinema already knows well — the sad, romantic ghost story — but it’s positioning itself against playing the premise for horror or for camp. Marcel’s death opens the story rather than serving as its twist, setting up a study of the specific kind of grief that comes from dying with something unsaid, and the specific kind of love that comes from finally getting to say it, dead or not.
The film’s Filipino-language title leans into that directness rather than hiding behind the English one. “Patay na patay sa’yo” is an idiom Filipinos use for being hopelessly, helplessly in love with someone — the kind of phrase usually reserved for teasing a friend about a crush. Applied to a character who is, at this point, also literally dead, it stops being a joke and becomes the plainest possible description of what the film is actually about.
Marcel’s unfinished confession is also the kind of stakes that don’t require a big twist to land — the audience already knows, from the title alone, roughly what’s coming. What “Multwoh” is betting on instead is that watching someone work up the nerve to say something out loud, even after it’s technically too late to change anything, still carries real weight. That’s a smaller, quieter bet than most ghost stories make, and a specifically personal one for a lead actor who’s said the role draws directly on her own life.
Puregold CinePanalo 2026 runs September 23 through October 4 across eight Metro Manila venues: Gateway Cineplex 18 Araneta (the festival hub, with exclusive Panorama Shorts screenings), TriNoma, Fairview Terraces, and Ayala Malls Feliz, Circuit, and Manila Bay, plus Market! Market! Tickets run ₱250 regular and ₱200 discounted (PWD, senior, student, national athlete, and Aling Puring & Perks cardholders). The ₱2,000 all-access festival pass covers all seven features and the student shorts program — sales for it open a day early, September 22, at Gateway Cineplex 18 specifically, ahead of the general September 23 on-sale everywhere else.