Smart suspense on a shoestring

It’s fitting that Truly Indie, the DIY arm of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s 2929 Entertainment, is releasing the movie “Cavite.” Truly Indie offers distribution and marketing to independent filmmakers, and “Cavite,” co-written and directed by Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana, is about as indie as you can get.

Made on a shoestring budget with a primary crew of two, the film is a dark, riveting thriller set in the Philippines and deeply personal with an appropriately edgy digital-video aesthetic. The filmmakers had resourcefully written a tight, densely plotted screenplay they could shoot themselves in a short time and set out to execute it. However, unable to find a female willing to accompany them to the islands to play the lead role, they rewrote the script for a man and Gamazon reluctantly took on the part.

Adam is a brooding, frustrated 32-year-old Filipino American living in San Diego and working a dead-end security job. A frantic call from his mother summons him to the Philippines for what we later learn is the funeral of his father.

At the Manila airport, Adam’s mother doesn’t show to pick him up. Suddenly, a cellphone rings. Adam apprehensively reaches into his backpack, into which someone has slipped an envelope containing the phone and graphic photographs. A voice on the phone informs Adam that his mother and sister have been kidnapped and he is to follow the man’s explicit orders or they will be killed.

Thrust into the roiling culture of a people and language he barely knows, Adam grudgingly follows the instructions leading him to the extremely impoverished streets of Cavite City, about 20 miles southwest of Manila. The voice on the end of the phone taunts him constantly, challenging his manhood and upbraiding him for his discomfort with speaking Tagalog.

Gamazon and Dela Llana adroitly involve the viewer in Adam’s plight, using the classic storytelling device of placing the audience in the same predicament as the protagonist. Adam is not a particularly sympathetic character initially, but Dela Llana’s hand-held camera and the film’s breakneck editing place us squarely in Adam’s shoes. There is no choice but to go along for the ride.

The only pauses the film takes are when Adam stops to catch his breath -- which are also the points at which a dead body or a severed finger in a cigarette carton are mostly likely to turn up. The hot, humid environment practically sweats through the screen, and when Adam crosses a garbage dump holding his nose it is easy to imagine its pungency.

As the voice on the phone leads him through a series of increasingly dangerous errands, Adam gets a harsh reawakening of his Filipino heritage. Though the film seldom deviates from its thriller format, Gamazon and Dela Llana astutely weave in matters of political, cultural and religious importance, elevating “Cavite” well above mere genre.

On screen throughout, sometimes at invasively close quarters, Gamazon holds the screen like a pro. Desperate and angry, Adam resents the orders he’s given but painfully transforms himself from a callow, inward-looking American to a battle-weary citizen of the world. We never learn what Adam’s hopes and aspirations are, but by the end of the film we’ve been shown a character study of a young man who agonizingly learns who he really is.

Gamazon and Dela Llana use the hardscrabble guerrilla filmmaking to their advantage in carving out a smart film that explores Adam’s hard-boiled cultural rebirth as he journeys through the back alleys and dusty squatters’ camps of his homeland. The imaginative filmmakers also manage to keep what could easily have been a gimmick fresh and compelling to the end.

*

‘Cavite’

MPAA rating: Unrated

A Truly Indie release. Writer-directors Ian Gamazon, Neill Dela Llana. Producers Gamazon, Dela Llana, Quynn Ton. Director of photography Dela Llana. Editors Gamazon, Dela Llana. Music Ato Mariano. In English and Tagalog with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Exclusively at the Landmark Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. (310) 281-8223.