Piolo Pascual
Barry
Overview
Set in the roads of Manila, the rural, the sea, and the “underground”, the film tells the story of Leo, the son, forced to grant his dying mother’s request to accompany his estranged father, Barry, to come home.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readThe Road That Wasn’t Long Enough
I kept waiting for The Ride to pull over. Not because the story demanded it—though it often did—but because the film itself seemed to be in a hurry to end. Sixty-four minutes is a short trip, especially when you’re carrying this much emotional baggage.
And yet, for all its brevity, the journey feels both too long and not nearly long enough.
Thop Nazareno’s film is, at its core, a father-son road movie dressed in the neon-lit grit of a crime thriller. Leo (Kyle Echarri), a young man with the wary eyes of someone who’s already seen too much, is forced to accompany his estranged father, Barry (Piolo Pascual), on a drive to fulfill his dying mother’s last wish. The premise is simple, almost primal: two men, one car, and the weight of years of silence between them.
But the film’s ambitions stretch beyond the confines of that vehicle, weaving in elements of the underground, the rural, and the criminal underbelly of Manila. It’s a lot to pack into an hour.
The first thing that strikes you about The Ride is how much it looks like a proper thriller. The cinematography leans into the moody, neon-soaked aesthetic of neo-noir, with the car’s interior bathed in the sickly glow of streetlights and dashboard LEDs. There’s a tactile quality to the way the camera lingers on Barry’s hands—calloused, restless—as he grips the wheel, or the way Leo’s fingers tap nervously against the window.
These are small details, but they ground the film in a physical reality that makes the emotional stakes feel more immediate. When the two men finally start talking, their dialogue is sharp and natural, devoid of the melodramatic flourishes that often plague Filipino family dramas. The silence between them isn’t just absence; it’s its own kind of language.
Audience Opinions
Audience 5.4/10
"A gritty, visually moody crime trip powered by Piolo Pascual’s commitment but dragged down by a thin, incomplete story."
Piolo Pascual’s emotional work and the grounded father‑son dynamic draw the most praise, with several viewers calling out the dark vibe, realistic dialogue, and tense car-bound sequences as the film’s strongest aspects. latestnetflix.com's read is that the short 64-minute runtime is widely seen as undercooked rather than tight, with complaints that the plot feels predictable, disjointed, and more like a stretched short film than a fully realized feature, leaving characters and emotional beats underdeveloped.
What viewers praise
- Engaging lead performance Piolo Pascual is consistently singled out as the heart of the film, delivering layered, emotional work that carries the father‑son storyline.
- Gritty dark tone The story’s bleak atmosphere and crime-world setting come through with a darker, less corny feel than more mainstream local action titles.
- Strong cinematography Neon-lit visuals, well-framed car interiors, and a few standout road sequences create a memorable neo‑noir look despite limited resources.
- Natural father‑son dialogue Conversations between Barry and Leo are described as realistic and grounded, helping the central relationship feel emotionally believable.
Common complaints
- Incomplete narrative The film is often described as feeling like a short project stretched to an hour, with an overall sense of being rushed, bitin, and underdeveloped.
- Thin and predictable plot Story beats follow expected patterns with few surprises, and several viewers find the script too weak to support the premise.
- Uneven pacing Despite the brief runtime, some stretches are called slow or dragging while key turns happen abruptly, making the ride feel off-balance.
- Mixed supporting performances Kyle Echarri in particular is viewed as lacking impact, with crying and high‑emotion scenes not matching the intensity of the lead.
- Low-budget roughness A number of comments describe the production as cheap or like a school project, with the limited scale showing through the thriller ambitions.
Recommended for
Gritty Filipino crime drama fans Piolo Pascual admirers Father‑son relationship stories Neo‑noir thriller seekers Short runtime feature films Indie‑style genre experiments
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey shot the father-son movie when Kyle was 18. They waited until he was 22 to show it.
The Ride is a 64-minute Filipino action film that reached Philippine cinemas on 24 September 2025. TMDB rates it R-13 and lists Thop Nazareno as director and co-writer with John Paul Bedia and Dodo Dayao. Piolo Pascual plays Barry. Kyle Echarri plays Leo, the son asked to ride with an estranged father so a dying mother can see him home. Netflix's logline is the same trip plus the criminal past that turns the road violent. latestnetflix.com's view is that Joey Marquez, Gabby Eigenmann, Ramon Christopher, and Kit Thompson are on the poster.
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The delay was the gossip, not a missing sex tape. Philstar's Nathalie Tomada reported the cameras first rolled in the pandemic. Piolo said they wanted a theatrical release and would not gamble on a film that was not a typical rom-com. MQuest later gave them a backbone. SM Cinemas took an exclusive run after focus groups and a long post-production. He called it a pet project for Spring Films with Cornerstone. He also said, on the record, that Kyle was 18 when they started, and that they went straight into the TV drama Pamilya Sagrado after. By the September 2025 screening Kyle was 22. Inquirer, writing in August when the poster dropped, called The Ride their second public pairing after that series. Both things can be true. The movie was first. The TV series reached viewers first. ,
Piolo told the press the work included fight scenes, motorcycle work, and car chases, locked down in Quezon for a couple of weeks. He grew a lot of facial hair and skipped the leading-man polish. "Did I make the right choices as a person, as a father, as a son?" he asked, hoping the film would force that question. Cornerstone's page lists him as an executive producer with Bb. Joyce Bernal, who also edited. Mackie Galvez and Albert Banzon shot it. Emerzon Texon scored it. That is a star producing his own grimy hour, not a studio accident. ,
The last scene landed on a funeral week.
Philstar also printed the detail that stuck in fan threads. Piolo said Kyle finished the film's last emotional scene a day after his sister died in April 2023. His parents were in the United States. The crew kept people around him. That date sits years after the first pandemic cameras, which means later shooting or a pickup. Nobody has published a salary figure. The rumor mill wanted a longer cut because 64 minutes feels like a squeezed night. What exists is that hour, then the Netflix window with Filipino audio and English subs. The poster copy the actors posted in August was already a dare. "Mahaba ang biyahe sa masalimuot na daan. Kakasa ka ba." Long road. Ugly road. Are you in? , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.