Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Filipiñana:
Magellan
If Filipiñana left you wanting more patient, unhurried Philippine cinema, Lav Diaz’s Magellan is the natural next stop. Gael García Bernal plays the Portuguese explorer whose voyage ended in the islands that would become the Philippines, and Diaz strips away any heroic myth-making to focus on the cost of conquest. It was also the Philippines’ Oscar submission, and it shares Filipiñana‘s interest in who pays when land is taken.
The Zone of Interest
Few films capture comfortable indifference as chillingly as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller play Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, who tend their flower beds and host pool parties on the other side of the wall from Auschwitz. Glazer keeps the horror offscreen, letting it seep in through the Oscar-winning sound design. Fans of Filipiñana‘s golfers playing on, oblivious to the lives around them, will recognize the same cold, observational eye.
Triangle of Sadness
Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner doesn’t always fire on all cylinders, but its takedown of the ultra-rich and the people paid to serve them makes it an easy companion piece. The film’s secret weapon is Filipina actress Dolly de Leon as Abigail, a cruise ship toilet manager who suddenly finds herself at the top of the pecking order once the wealthy passengers are stranded on an island.
Parasite
Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite remains the defining class satire of the century. The struggling Kim family cons its way into working for the wealthy Park household one job at a time, until the hidden costs of the arrangement come flooding to the surface. Like Filipiñana, it’s built around a beautiful, carefully designed space for the rich that depends entirely on the people kept out of sight.
Burning
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is a slow-burn temperature check of modern male rage, following Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young aspiring writer, as he becomes fixated on Ben (Steven Yeun), a wealthy, unreadable man who may know what happened to the woman they both care about. Like Filipiñana, it’s patient to a fault and lets class resentment simmer for most of its runtime, saving its most devastating turn for the very end.
It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner earns its accolades. A mechanic named Vahid kidnaps a man he believes tortured him in prison, recognizing him only by the squeak of his prosthetic leg, and then rounds up other former prisoners to help him decide what to do next. Filipiñana asks why it’s so hard for the powerless to act against the powerful, and Panahi builds an entire film around that same dilemma.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s historical epic examines how greed and violence infiltrated the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, as white settlers schemed to take the oil wealth beneath Osage land. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone lead the cast. Like Filipiñana, it’s about land taken from the people who lived on it and the polite society that grows up on top of that theft.
The Menu
Eating the rich has never been plated so literally. Mark Mylod’s The Menu sends a group of wealthy diners to an exclusive island restaurant run by a celebrity chef (Ralph Fiennes), with Anya Taylor-Joy as the outsider who doesn’t belong at the table. Its view of the staff who keep an exclusive club running, and how little the guests notice them, will feel very familiar.
Saltburn
Emerald Fennell’s provocative Saltburn may be light on substance, but few recent films are as fascinated by the closed world of the very rich. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver, an Oxford student who is invited to spend the summer at the sprawling estate of his aristocratic classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi). Like Clara in Filipiñana, Oliver gets an inside look at a gilded world, though he’s much less troubled by what he finds there.
Mountainhead
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead is a claustrophobic tech bro satire about four billionaire friends, played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef, holed up in a luxury mountain retreat while the world spirals into chaos below them. Swap the mountain for a manicured golf course and you have a lot of what makes Filipiñana so damning: the powerful carrying on as usual while everyone else lives with the consequences.
READ MORE: Filipiñana Ending, Explained, 10 Movies Like Parasite
