Trese

Between Two Worlds, Between Two Expectations

I’ll admit it: I came to Trese expecting a Filipino Hellboy—a detective story where the monsters are real, the stakes are personal, and the folklore feels lived-in, not just decorative. The tagline—"You fear them. They fear her."—promised a heroine with teeth, a woman who could stare down the supernatural and make it blink first.

And for a while, the show delivers on that promise. But somewhere between the neon-lit streets of Manila and the shadowy realms of myth, Trese stumbles over its own ambition, caught between the weight of its source material and the slick, globalized sheen of Netflix animation.

The premise is irresistible: Alexandra Trese, a detective with one foot in the human world and the other in the diwata (spirit) realm, polices crimes that blur the line between the two. The show’s opening episode throws us into the deep end—a murder investigation that quickly spirals into a confrontation with the aswang, shape-shifting creatures from Filipino folklore that feast on the living.

The animation here is fluid, almost tactile, with a color palette that oscillates between the sickly green of a crime scene and the eerie blue of a spirit’s glow. It’s the kind of visual contrast that makes you lean in, even if you don’t yet know the rules of this world.

And that’s the problem. Trese never quite trusts its audience to keep up. The show is based on a comic by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo, which has spent over a decade building a rich, self-contained mythology. The Netflix adaptation, however, seems to assume that most viewers will be encountering these creatures for the first time.

The result is a series that often feels like it’s talking at you rather than inviting you in. Every other line of dialogue is an explanation—what an aswang is, how the kapre (tree giants) operate, why the tikbalang (horse-headed tricksters) are such a nuisance. It’s the kind of exposition that would make a Supernatural fan groan.

Folklore, by its nature, is meant to be mysterious, even unsettling. When you strip away the ambiguity, you’re left with something that feels more like a Wikipedia entry than a story.

That’s not to say Trese lacks for atmosphere. The show’s Manila is a character in its own right—a city of towering skyscrapers and crumbling alleys, where the past and present collide in every frame. The animation team (whose names, frustratingly, aren’t credited in the available research) has a knack for capturing the claustrophobia of urban life, the way the city’s neon glow can’t quite penetrate the darkness of its underbelly.