A young man arrives in Manila looking for a girl. Her name is Ligaya Paraiso, or Joyful Paradise. That is the film’s first joke. It does not get funnier. She has vanished into the city’s trafficking economy. He drifts through construction sites where wages are shaved, deaths written off. Mike de Leon’s camera keeps him small—a figure in spaces built to dwarf and discard him. Streets named Misericordia [mercy] appear again and again. No mercy appears. When he finally fights back, the system never intervenes. The state does not have to be there; it has distributed itself into everyone present.