Melodrama is a cornerstone genre of both Korean and Filipino cinema, with expressions rooted in specific cultural histories of trauma, faith, and resilience.

While sacrifice is a core narrative engine in both Korean and Filipino melodrama, serving as the ultimate proof of love or moral fortitude, where they diverge is in emotional intensity and tonal register. While Korean melodrama favors restraint, moments that become more powerful in silence, Philippine iterations embrace expressive suffering, often tied to religion or family.

The tear-streaked face of a human being on the verge of proffering themself up for the ultimate sacrifice: this, very likely, is the very first image that the mention of “melodrama” conjures in one’s mind.

In the common lexicon, “melodrama” is a pejorative. The use of the word often insinuates histrionics, emotional exploitation and manipulation. But despite its connotations and how it is often perceived, melodrama has come into its own as a form of storytelling, a cornerstone of different Asian cinemas – Korean and Filipino cinema among these.

If one were to consider melodrama a common “language” in film, then Korean and Filipino cinema would be speaking distinct dialects: one favors restraint, and the other embraces expressive emotionality. But despite these differences in tonal register, rooted in cultural histories and specificities, common, recognizable threads run through the fabrics of both.

In the introduction to Melodrama and Asian Cinema, a pioneering foundational text on the subject, editor Wimal Dissayanake highlights the valorization of human suffering as a key thematic element of Asian melodrama. Though separated by a host of differences, not least language and geography, both Korean and Filipino films treat suffering, particularly sacrifice, as their beating heart, a core narrative engine, of their respective traditions of melodrama.

An Abundance of Motherly Love: Stories of Maternal Sacrifice

This section will investigate representations of maternal love and sacrifice by contrasting two films: 집으로 (2002, dir. Lee Jeong-hyang) and Anak (2000, dir. Rory B. Quintos).

In 집으로 (trans. The Way Home), a seven-year-old city boy, Sang-woo, is taken by his mother to live with his mute grandmother, an impoverished produce seller who lives in a house with a thatched roof in the countryside, as the former seeks new employment. Already clearly apprehensive of his new environment, Sang-woo’s disdainfulness is heightened further by his grandmother’s inability to provide him with the same luxuries he grew up with in the city. But seeing his grandmother’s sacrifices, all done wordlessly, with no trace of resentment, eventually softens his heart. At the end of his story, by the time his mother is ready to take him back to Seoul, his goodbye from the back window of a bus is teary, communicating a newfound love and appreciation for her.

In Anak (trans. Child), Josie is an OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) working as a nanny in Hong Kong to support her children in the Philippines. Upon coming home, though, she finds not warmth but hostility and resentment from her children, particularly her eldest daughter, Carla, who sees Josie’s sacrifice as abandonment, especially in the wake of their father’s death. Throughout the narrative, Carla’s callous rebellion escalates continuously, where the audience sees her fall further and further down a rabbit hole of vices, right until the eve of her mother’s departure for Hong Kong. Josie decides to return to her life overseas in order to continue providing for her children but Carla angrily ridiculing this decision results in an explosive, tearful confrontation that ends with Josie desperately pleading with Carla – if Carla could not find it in her heart to still love Josie as her mother, then to at least recognize and respect her as a human being.

Both stories are driven by a maternal absence—Sang-woo’s mother and Josie respectively—that stirs some sort of resentment within the child protagonists of each film.

While the films tackle different kinds of maternal relationships, they both lionize maternal sacrifice at their core. But while 집으로 whispers, Anak wails.

There is a silent dignity to the sacrifice of Sang-woo’s grandmother, whose muteness further underscores, even magnifies, her loving actions for Sang-woo, in line with Confucian ideals and the minimalism of Korean cinema.

Meanwhile, the dramatization of the confrontation between Carla and Josie is unapologetically expressive and emotionally turbulent, aligned with the kind of intensity a typical Filipino audience would find in a teleserye (a nightly Filipino soap opera, often broadcast during prime evening hours).

Divine Redemption: Crises of Faith and Forgiveness

This section will examine portrayals of suffering in relation to faith, grief, and forgiveness. This examination will cover the films 밀양 (2007, dir. Lee Chang-dong) and Himala (1982, dir. Ishmael Bernal).

The center of 밀양 (trans. Secret Sunshine) is Shin-ae, the recently widowed mother of Jun, who decides to move their lives to her husband’s hometown, Miryang. When Jun is discovered drowned, evidently murdered, at a reservoir, her daycare teacher, Do-seop, is quickly apprehended and revealed to be the killer. While Shin-ae barely sheds tears at Jun’s funeral, her suffering comes to a head when she decides to visit Do-seop in prison, and he claims that he has found forgiveness from God. This forces her to confront and collapse under the idea of a God who would forgive Do-seop for what he did – particularly when she could not.

Himala (trans. Miracle) is a classic of Philippine cinema. Helmed by Ishmael Bernal, widely considered one of the masters of the craft, Himala tells the story of Elsa, a young woman from a sleepy town plagued by drought, who reports seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and soon after becomes a faith healer. Her miraculous work brings a boom of business to the town but after a string of misfortunes culminating in a cholera epidemic, Elsa stops faith healing. The film climaxes with Elsa’s now-iconic proclamation of “Walang himala!” (“There are no miracles!”) – which is quickly followed by the firing of a gun that mortally wounds Elsa, and causes a stampede in the crowd of faithfuls, injuring and killing those who sought Elsa’s miracle in the first place.

In 밀양, Shin-ae’s disintegration happens from the inside, a conflict of the individual against God – a God whose values do not align with what she learned, what she was taught, and what she imagines. Meanwhile, in Himala, this collapse happens on a public scale, on a stage, with mass hysteria punctuating the life of Elsa – then framed as a martyr of sorts.

This polarity in tonal registers highlights the private and public dimensions of the experience of faith.

Whisper vs. Wail: Stylistic Clashes in Korean and Filipino Films

Emotional intensity in Korean melodramas can be considered a whisper. Carefully considered formal elements like long takes, muted color palettes, and minimal scoring combine with hushed voices and small gestures to present an emotional journey that is more outwardly restrained.

Meanwhile, the tonal register of Filipino melodramas is more akin to a wail. Emerging from a place of theatricality, even excess, loud confrontations and tears are a dominant presentation, often punctuated by the swell of an orchestra.

One cinematic body cries in whispers, while the other does so in wails – yet both reveal different depths and raw truths of the human condition, and ultimately have the power to leave us undone in the dark of the cinema.

The language of sacrifice is universal but distinct cultural inflections that drive storytelling in Korean and Filipino melodrama respectively give them very different emotional textures.

Again in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Dissanayake says, “The excesses and extremes in melodrama become signifiers of the alienation of their characters and useful openings through which we can discuss the play of ideology.”

To many, melodrama will always be “too much.” Yet it is precisely this emotional excess—whether whispered or wailed—that makes it true and resonant, capturing the sometimes unbearable yet always beautiful weight of simply being human.

Written by LJ Z. Galvez

Edited by kofic