Three Reasons to Watch “Her Locket”: Sinag Maynila’s Big Winner and Rebecca Chuaunsu’s Magnum Opus

Rebecca Chuaunsu’s Her Locket (2023, Dir. J.E. Tiglao) is a layered treatise on memory, familial ties, and feminist assertion, all told with raw and compelling honesty. This film’s painful narrative, set against the backdrop of conservative Filipino-Chinese culture, unpacks the unraveling of long-buried secrets, forced silence and, ultimately, personal liberation.

1. A Bold, Feminist Story Rooted in Personal Truth

Her Locket centers on two women from contrasting worlds—Jewel, a wealthy elderly matriarch struggling with memory loss; the Teresa, a poor, young caregiver burdened by her past. Though divided by class and age, both are bound by painful familial legacies. The older woman fights to reclaim her place in her family’s history, while the younger one seeks to erase hers. The story is based on real events in Chuaunsu’s life, shaped by the discovery of her parents’ diaries after her father’s death. Her journey through these revelations, simmering in her mind for over three decades, finally takes shape on screen.

When the pandemic hit, the film almost didn’t happen. With the death of her husband, Chuaunsu feared Her Locket would remain shelved. Yet, despite the odds, she pressed on. “But I made it,” she said, a phrase that resonates with the film’s themes of resilience and the courage to confront the past.

2. An Unflinching Look at Filipino-Chinese Culture

Beyond its autobiographical nature, Her Locket offers a rare glimpse into the intricacies of Filipino-Chinese family life, where inheritance, duty, and tradition collide instead of meld with Jewel’s defiance and her brother’s subplot of queer identity. The film captures the tension between personal desire and rigid family expectations, especially for women and men in a patriarchal, hierarchical structure. Chuaunsu’s Jewel grapples with these forces as she navigates her family’s dynamics, made more complex by their business culture and identity struggles.

The film’s titular locket serves as a metaphor for Jewel’s worldview, predicament, and struggle—a unique gem on a traditional crown, a treasured relic straddling past and present, a keepsake of core childhood memories, and a physical reminder of the battle she faces to reclaim what’s rightfully hers. It’s a personal journey that is epic in its embodiment of the rise and fall of a rich Chinese family and the pressures of preserving wealth, reputation, and tradition yet giving in to her and her brothers’ choices.

Teresa, her caregiver, is also entangled in her web of familial pain. This subplot follows her longing for transformation, symbolized by her desire for plastic surgery to escape her past, adds another layer of depth and complexity to the film. Both women are navigating lives separated by yet also strangely bridged by class, culture, and memory.

3. Chuaunsu’s Best Cinematic Performance Yet

Chuaunsu’s portrayal of Jewel is a swinging pendulum of emotions, equally breathtaking and harrowing. She shifts between youthful defiance and elderly vulnerability with unabashed authenticity. Thus, Jewel’s internal struggle—snapping between nostalgic recollection and erratic dementia—becomes heartbreaking yet empowering. This tour de force performance earned her a string of Best Actress awards from the 2024 Sinag Maynila Film Festival in the Philippines, the 2024 Wu Wei Taipei International Film Festival in Taiwan, and the 2023 Festival International du Film Transsaharien de Zagora in Morocco.

The Sinag Maynila jury, including critically acclaimed director Lav Diaz of Berlin-Cannes-Venice fame, praised her for an “effortless portrayal of a woman who connects with her past through her locket,” and rightly so. Chuaunsu’s Jewel feels genuine and lived-in, a performance shaped by years of theater training under the tutelage of Filipino theater legends Tony Mabesa and Anton Juan. Her ability to embody both the rebellious daughter and the anxious mother in old age, fraught with dementia, is a testament to her versatility as an actor and her daring honesty to reveal her soul.

Her “no acting acting” has created for Chuaunsu her magnus opus as an actor to be reckoned with here and around the world.

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Her Locket isn’t just a family melodrama but also a tragicomedy. It is an epic that tackles sensitive topics like inheritance battles, patriarchal dominance, sibling rivalry, gay love, and interracial love.

How does a woman in a conservative culture fight for herself against societal and familial expectations? How does a daughter face her father’s betrayal while navigating her own motherhood? And how does a woman’s sense of identity shift when everything she knows crumbles?

These questions drive Her Locket, a film that masterfully balances the tension between remembering and forgetting, love and vengeance. The film’s period details—from opulent Chinese mansions and 70s discotheques to a worn, disheveled home—enhance its melancholic atmosphere, portraying the inevitable passage of time and the fragility of memory.

The film’s visual storytelling, praised for its “painstaking design and unobtrusive camera work,” along with a strong ensemble cast, makes it a cinematic experience not to be missed. It is a triumph of storytelling, universal yet deeply personal, a tale of revenge, forgiveness, and redemption that transcends cultural boundaries.

How does a caretaker who doesn’t have anything avoid the temptation of stealing from her ward? How will she navigate the thin line between taking her ward’s most important possession and key to memory to unlock her own dreams? How will she make right from wrong by forgetting it is her job to protect someone’s memory?

Her Locket deserves all the accolades it has reaped across film festivals from the Philippines to Taiwan and Morocco. With screenings at the upcoming San Diego Film Festival and other international venues, its pastiche of cultural specificity and universal themes makes it a movie worth seeking out.

Would Jewel in her moments of lucidity choose to forget and live the contented life of a single mother with her beloved lawyer-son? Will she give her estranged brother his just deserts and throw him in jail for tampering documents to get their family’s wealth? Will she finally win her part of the inheritance to change her life, her son’s, and, perhaps, her caregiver’s? Her Locket has all the answers.

Immerse yourself in this singular cinematic journey—tender yet ruthless, intimate yet unflinching—and witness Rebecca Chuaunsu cement her place among the Philippines’ finest actors. Her Locket doesn’t just tell a story; it grips you, demanding to be felt, remembered, and reckoned with, as Chuaunsu delivers a performance that defines both her career and the depths of human resilience.