‘Swipe’ Review: Unable to connect

There are many things to admire about Ed Lejano’s Swipe.

In essence, the film follows the disparate lives of an apartment complex’s residents and employees. They all seem bound together by their respective romantic aspirations’ reliance on the titular dating app.

Crisscrossing conflicts 

Frank (Gabby Eigenmann) is a married businessman who is living a double life. Spending most of his week away from his wife and kid, he begins to pursue his repressed attraction for other men. Janet (Meg Imperial) and her boyfriend (Alex Medina) have just started to live together. Perpetually paranoid, she begins to suspect that her boyfriend is having an affair with a co-worker.

Middle-aged Gloria (Maria Isabel Lopez) has been maintaining an online relationship with Ted (Alvin Anson) for some time now. Ted suddenly announces that he is taking a business trip to Manila and that he desperately wants to see her. Finally, married security guard Loida (Mercedes Cabral) has been regularly sleeping with the apartment manager (Luis Alandy), who has started to develop a dangerous attachment to her.

John Bedia’s screenplay establishes the groundwork of conflicts crisscrossing only during the most opportune moments of heightened drama and tension. This storytelling design, while familiar, is efficient and convenient, creating a certain illusion of people living within a certain proximity but barely interacting. Through other conceits, the film also touches on the issue of privacy, or the lack of it, in a contemporary culture where concepts of personal and virtual spaces are interchangeable.

All the characters have intriguing dilemmas, all of which are hardly exactly novel. But if coupled with a modern mindset, this could create perspectives that are fresh and worth navigating.

Faltering ambitions 

The 4 narratives endeavor to explore a myriad of themes with extreme economy in both plot and characterization. It’s arguably quite ambitious considering that what Lejano seeks to accomplish is to provide a scathing portraiture of wretched humanity living in a world of disconnect given an abundance of connectivity, even if it is the superficial kind. 

However, Swipe ultimately fails in all of its very lofty ambitions and ideas. The film feels overwhelmed by the wide variety of its intentions. It is overburdened and stretched, with Lejano struggling to tell everything he wants to tell within a comfortable pace without sacrificing his creative and intellectual aims. It is hurried and quite impersonal. It achieves no real emotions, no immediate or growing pleasures.

Even its efforts to intellectualize modern connections become simplistic and moralistic. The film never really digs deep enough. It refuses to connect the loose threads and the dominant themes, foregoing complexity for easy thrills and tensions that never even materialized. 

Sadly, Swipe just ends up being just a slight sliver of its grand motives. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.