Synopsis
Undergrads (2024) is a Filipino coming-of-age drama, focusing on a college or high school setting. It tells the story of two best friends, Aly and Sophia, as they come to terms with the emotional difficulties of friendship, attraction, and their evolving identity.
Aly is calm, reserved, and introverted while Sophia is talkative and inquisitive. Their friendship blossoms slowly. It starts with sharing snacks, post-class walks, and gentle teasing. Little do they know, their bond is wells of mutually concealed emotions. As the two bond more, a new form of tension builds between them—emotional, romantic, and eventually physical.
Aly starts to feel emotions she has never felt before. Specifically, she feels the desire to intimately connect with Sophia beyond the bounds of friendship. Sophia, on the other hand, seems to play with the line that separates friendship and romance, leaving Aly confused about her feelings and Sophia’s intention.
The movie depicts the evolution of a relationship from a casual friendship towards romantic ambiguity and eventual self-discovery. Both women grapple with fears, the expectations of society, and the conservative culture surrounding same-sex attraction in the context of the world they inhabit. The plot centers on the interior lives of two individuals in love, making the desire to process emotion difficult and at times, impossible.
Characters and Cast
Aly (played by Rica Gonzales)
Aly plays the part of the emotional anchor in the story. As the story develops, it is clear that the character is thoughtful in nature and somewhat shy, which translates to her being a character who is in denial of her feelings, as is the case with her best friend, who she also happens to love. A significant amount of the movie depicts journeys characterized by longing, the tranquility of silence, unrequited love, and hushed aching. For her, the journey requires that she heals and is unprotected, bluntly vulnerable as she goes through emotional layers woven by moments she has not let herself process.
Sophia (played by Athena Red)
Sophia embraces boldness and physical affection, marking her as an extrovert. She ambiguously intertwines playful and romantic actions, and perhaps even to herself, where the delineation truly lies. Sophia’s struggles with her reality eventually surface, revealing to Sophia battling with understanding the contours of her longings and what her identity truly is.
Supporting Characters
Aly and Sophia are the main focus of the film, but classmates, teachers, and family members add social context, providing the necessary background. Their range of reactions, support and skepticism, highlight the additional challenges of identity exploration facing youth, particularly within a culture that is still heavily conservative.
Direction and Cinematic Style
Composition conveys a delicate and subtle control of the film and its’-structure. The film’s visual style is intimate and is built from a series of close-ups, handheld camera movements, and use of natural lighting. Rather than action, fast-paced scenes, or dramatic turns in the plot, the focus in Undergrads is on gazes, pauses, and proximity.
The film’s aesthetics have a softness to them. The characters’ emotional journeys are mundane yet realistic, taking place in quiet rooms, school corridors, and sunny outdoors. When the film does include sound, it features soft, minimalistic instrumentals that accompany the changing moods of the story.
Viewers are kept in the moments of longing, awkwardness, and internal struggle, and the film makes no effort to speed up the tension. This slow, methodical pacing gives the film a sense of authenticity, allowing the film to mirror the way real-life relationships unfold, which is uncertain and laden with emotions.
Thematic Elements and Analysis
The study of identity and sexual awakening.
Undergrads focuses on two women grappling with their feelings for one another and the culture that tries to silence those emotions. The film portrays the profound realization of emotions that don’t fit the norm, encapsulating the struggle in conveying that realization while still coming to terms with it.
Friendship vs. Romance
The conflict between a care-free friendship and romantic love is a key idea in this work. The interactions that Aly and Sophia share could be interpreted as the affectionate behavior typical of best friends. Aly and Sophia could be seen as romantic couples or as best friends. The ambiguity underscores the point of how difficult it is to draw borders between different feelings and emotions at a more juvenile stage of life.
Silence and Societal Pressures
The film brings to life how silence can define queer love. In Sophia and Aly’s world, love is surrounded by silence, and neither Aly nor Sophia speaks about what they genuinely feel. This silence acts as a unique additional character in the duo’s relationship. This silence alongside societal pressure can lead one to trim their imagination in a queer relationship as the relationship is always fogged by the fear of being exposed or blatantly labeled as shameful.
Emotional Honesty
Trusting emotions and declaring one’s self to the world is risky. Vulnerability is risky, and to an extent, bloody scary. The film empowers viewers, presenting emotional honesty as a unique form of bravery. In a world devoid of personal labels and containers, Aly’s acts of trusting her feelings transform the narrative as one of bravery and trusting one’s feelings.
Reception and its Effect on Culture
Although Undergrads may not have achieved massive box-office success or international recognition, it represents a quiet yet crucial advancement in Filipino LGBTQ+ storytelling. The film joins a growing body of work that approaches gender and sexuality with empathy and realism by addressing the queer youth’s emotional landscapes.
The film’s shorter length of a little over sixty-five minutes makes it seem like a fleeting moment in time instead of a grand, sweeping story. However, in that fleeting moment, the film highlights a snapshot of the young love’s tenderness and strength, the agony of concealing one’s truth, and the fleeting magic of being seen by another.
For anyone who has gone through the awkward, delightful, and slightly terrifying experience of love for the first time—especially queer love—Underlying capturing these themes feels deeply relatable. Although subtle, its emotional resonance has lasting impact.
Final Remarks
Undergrads (2024) is an unabashedly intimate and raw account of two young women trying to understand themselves. The film is a striking exploration of love in all its complexities featuring powerful performances, gentle direction, and an unwavering commitment to emotional authenticity.
It does not provide simple explanations nor does it provide compelling endings. Rather, it welcomes us into the gentle, private universe of Aly and Sophia, where affection starts with bewilderment, develops amid stillness, and is uncertain of whether it can endure the weight of reality.
Undergrads is often overlooked because it is not large, loud, or produced, and instead, it offers a small, soft, and honest portrayal. This is a uniquely relatable story of anyone who has ever pondered about their existence, identity, romantic partner, and the extent to which they are comfortable exposing their true selves to the world.
Watch Free Movies on Fmovies