Yes, Lav DiaZ’s Melancholia is eight hours long, but it’s more of a shape-shifter than a monolith. What begins as a portrait of contemporary Filipino life on the margins of society (in the soggy township of Sagada) creeps slowly towards the country’s bourgeois centre (Manila) before doubling back to consider its tumultuous recent political history.

These movements are organized around two former revolutionaries — Julian (Roeder Camanag) and Alberta (Angeli Bayani) — struggling with the spectres of deaths both literal (their fellow desaparecidos, kidnapped and murdered by the military) and figurative (their own eroded idealism). What keeps Melancholia from simply being an ext-ended wallow in its titular condition is the way that Diaz supplements his contemplative filmmaking style — distended, black-and-white DV compositions taken from a fixed perspective — with blindsiding narrative revelations that force us to reconsider each punishing moment. He also keeps our attention by way of a sophisticated soundscape that encompasses both the gently ambient (rain on the rooftop) and the violently assaultive (a noise-band jam session that threatens to go on forever and nearly gets there).