I spent much of my youth daydreaming, creating elaborate scenarios that others might have dismissed as childish or self-indulgent. But I didn’t care. My imagination was my escape, and I made sure to indulge in it every single day.
My love for storytelling can be traced back to these moments. It was a simple principle: the stories I created in my mind entertained me, so I wrote them down, preserving them like songs burned onto a CD for future playback.
But I had a problem. I could start stories, yet I never quite knew how to end them. That changed when I encountered a certain film.
Enter Lino Brocka and Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag
National Artist Lino Brocka’s 1975 masterpiece, Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, altered the way I viewed storytelling, particularly its endings.
The film
The film follows Julio Madiaga (played by Rafael Roco Jr.), a young man from Marinduque who arrives in Manila in search of his lost love, Ligaya Paraiso (played by Hilda Koronel).
Like a fish out of water, Julio struggles to survive in a city rife with crime, corruption, and inequality. His search leads him to a nondescript building on Ongpin Street, where he fears Ligaya has been forced into prostitution. When they finally reunite, she confirms his worst fears — she has been sold to a mestizo de sangley and desperately wants to escape. Julio promises to take her home.
But Ligaya never arrives. Julio later learns why — her death is ruled an accident, but her body bears suspicious bruises. Overcome with grief and rage, he seeks revenge, only to be consumed by the brutal, unforgiving city.
Trapped in the city’s claws
There’s a reason this film remains one of the most celebrated in Philippine cinema. Brocka’s masterful storytelling transforms Manila into a living, breathing antagonist, a beast whose claws dig into its characters, refusing to let them go.
Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag is a tragic love story and an unflinching critique of urban poverty, systemic oppression, and the relentless cycle of hardship faced by the working class in 1970s Manila.
Urban isolation
Julio’s journey mirrors the experiences of countless provincial migrants who arrive in the city with hope, only to be met with disillusionment. What begins as a quest for love morphs into a brutal lesson about the city’s hostility toward dreamers and outsiders.
Class struggles, exploitation
The film lays bare the harsh realities of class struggle. To survive long enough to find Ligaya, Julio endures grueling labor, abusive employers, and exploitative conditions even considering prostitution at one point. Ligaya, on the other hand, represents a much larger issue: the commodification of women’s bodies and the prevalence of human trafficking. Both characters embody the structural failures that continue to plague society.
Corruption, moral decay, lost innocence
Corruption permeates the story at every level. Those in power wield their influence over the vulnerable whether through economic exploitation, coercion, or outright violence.
Julio’s final act of violence is not just an impulsive reaction but the culmination of his transformation. We watch as he gradually inches toward the edge, dipping his toes into moral ambiguity before finally plunging headfirst into vengeance. By the end, he is no longer the hopeful young man who arrived in Manila; he is another casualty of the city’s cruelty.
Ligaya and Julio’s doomed fates underscore the film’s central message: for many, escape is merely an illusion. The city’s “claws” never loosen their grip.
Why do bleak endings resonate?
I have watched Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag four times in the past decade. The first was for a reaction paper in class. I rewatched it the same evening because I had fallen asleep halfway through. The third was during a free screening, and the most recent was for this column.
I often wonder why I’m so drawn to stories with bleak, bittersweet, or tragic endings. It’s not that I dislike happy endings — many of my favorite films have them — but rather, I find realism in the weight of consequence.
Cause and effect. Action and reaction. These elements give a story a sense of completion. The more mistakes characters make, the harder it is to believe they will get a neat, happy ending.
But when a film respects its audience enough to follow through on the consequences of its characters’ choices, it feels like a reward for paying attention.
I’ve never been good at ending my own write-ups. But if Brocka’s work has taught me anything, it’s that a good ending doesn’t have to be happy — it just has to feel earned.
An audience shouldn’t walk away feeling like they wasted their time. They came into the theater hungry for a story. The best endings leave them full yet haunted, the film still running through their minds long after the credits roll.
The lasting impact of Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag proves that Brocka understood this storytelling principle better than most.
