Ryzz Denzyll Butiong

Some bones refuse to be buried.

In some cultures, green bones — the remnants that persist after the body is cremated — are thought to carry strange, potent luck. In the Filipino film Green Bones, these seem unlikely to offer salvation amidst the weight of grief, justice, and the relentless pull of a broken system — or do they?


Winner of Best Picture at the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), the film at its core are two men: Xavier Gonzaga (Ruru Madrid) and Domingo Zamora (Dennis Trillo). Gonzaga, a young, principled police officer with a burning need for retribution, has just lost his sister to a brutal crime. The grief festers into obsession, and Zamora, a mute prisoner, seems an easy target for Gonzaga. 

Gonzaga arrives at the facility in San Fabian, expecting a clear divide between black and white, only to find a world where the lines blur into gray and dissolve entirely. In San Fabian, right and wrong are constructs, flexible depending on who has power and receives it. As Gonzaga watches Zamora, his sense of justice begins to unravel.  

Green Bones makes the audience confront the uncomfortable truth that the distinction between good and evil is almost irrelevant in a system designed to fail those it claims to protect. The marginalized — prisoners, LGBTQIA+ individuals, the deaf and mute — are not sidelined here, but are central to the narrative, exposing the truth that in a system this broken, everyone becomes both a victim and a perpetrator. 

Zamora’s vow, “Babalikan kita,” aided by the mournful strains of Nyebe by SB19, emphasizes the film’s despair of a world where justice is an illusion. It becomes not just a threat, but a promise — a statement about the cyclical nature of justice.  

The film’s critical acclaim is also well-earned as Dennis Trillo won Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Ruru Madrid earned Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Ricky Lee and Angeli Atienza’s screenplay won Best Screenplay, while Neil Daza’s cinematography captured the decay of prison and society, earning him the Best Cinematography prize. Sienna Stevens, whose performance as a young girl caught in the prison's web of cruelty, earned her the Best Child Performer award.

Ultimately, the film offers no easy answers but instead, it asks uncomfortable questions: can we escape the past? Can a system that perpetuates its injustice ever truly reform? And if it can, what is the price we must pay to begin that journey? The bones, like the truths they represent, refuse to stay buried. They rise again and again, relentless and inescapable.

In the end, Green Bones does not merely reflect the dysfunction of a prison system, for it compels us to look at our own larger society that sustains it. But in that haunting realization lies the only truth and message that matters:

It is not the green bones that offer us hope — it is in confronting what lies beneath them, and the system that creates them, that we may find the only path to true change.