Backpackers (2022) is a Philippine adult thriller, and its published synopsis runs to two sentences. A boy and two girls set off into the jungle together. They don’t know a killer is behind them. That is the whole description, and it is all I have to review from. So I will say plainly what the film’s own paperwork commits it to, and what it leaves out.

Bong Bordones directs. Enigmatic Film Production presents it as an Enigmatic Original, in association with DW17 Entertainment Productions and HDLab Post Production. The credited cast is Kevin Dy as Dags, Roi Neri as Vale, Salome Salvi as Kara and Aylene Velasco as Mitch. Count the names. The synopsis speaks of three travellers and the credits list four roles, and nothing says how the fourth fits in, so I will leave it alone. Four actors, one trip, one threat: a small thriller with a small footprint. Small is not a flaw. It does mean the film has little to hide behind.

Young people, a remote place, a stalker. Anyone who watches genre films will recognise the setup from the first line. It runs on dramatic irony. We know about the killer and the travellers do not, so every rest stop and every wrong turn is meant to carry a second meaning. The device is cheap and dependable. It tells you where the tension should come from, not what happens in front of the camera, and it pays off only if the film keeps working on the gap between what we know and what the characters know. A killer who turns up too early gives away the fear. One who stays off screen for too long leaves us checking the time.

The label matters too. The film is sold as an adult movie, and the synopsis itself calls the girls sexy, so the marketing is open about where it puts its weight. Suspense and titillation pull in opposite directions. Suspense wants a held breath and a cut that arrives a beat late; the come-on wants the shot to linger. A film that sells both has to pick one when they collide, and the pitch gives no hint of which. Going by the packaging alone, I suspect the sales copy leads with the girls and not with the killer.

On the acting, the most an honest critic can say from a credit block is that the premise asks for types more than for people. Dy, Neri, Salvi and Velasco play travellers who are introduced as already heading toward danger. A thriller of this kind rarely gives its performers time to turn a type into someone the audience worries about, and without that worry a killer’s shadow has little to threaten. Nobody fears for a stranger. If that proves to be a weakness, it would be a weakness of conception, not of performance, and the cast should not carry the blame.

The jungle is the premise’s best card. It gives a killer cover, it puts help a long way off, and it explains why nobody hears anything. Those advantages come free with the genre. What would make them count is evidence that someone chose where the danger comes from and why, and the published material shows none. If the jungle is merely named as dangerous, it stays a backdrop. If the film uses its distances, its noise and its dead ends, it starts to feel like a threat in its own right. The synopsis names the jungle and says nothing more about it, which on paper puts the film nearer the backdrop than the threat.

There is also the matter of what the film asks of its audience. Telling us about the killer from the start gives us a job: watch the travellers and wait. Waiting is bearable only when it has a shape, when the film tightens and loosens and tells us when to brace. A premise this plain depends on that shaping more than most. Without it, the waiting turns into a long walk through trees with something at our back.

Backpackers looks like a modest genre exercise, and it states its intentions plainly: people go into the trees, and something follows them. My reservation is that this is also all it states. A thriller has to give us a reason to stay beyond the premise, and the material offers none. Viewers who come for the setup and ask nothing more will find what is advertised. Anyone expecting more is taking a gamble.

Tags: thrillers, Backpackers, Bong Bordones, Kevin Dy, Roi Neri, Salome Salvi