In the Philippines, we call it a comfort room. Not restroom. Not bathroom. Comfort. Maybe because it’s one of the few places where you can be alone without explaining why. Rodina Singh’s “Dreamboi” understands this instinct too well. The film begins where most people look away, in the quiet corners where trans women are forced to build their own sense of safety.
Singh, who I first saw explore transition and family in “Mamu: And a Mother Too,” comes back with something smaller but closer to the bone. “Dreamboi” centers on Diwa, played with quiet restraint by EJ Jallorina, a trans woman pulled into the voice of Tony Labrusca’s titular character, an underground audio performer who feels familiar even before he’s real. Her curiosity turns inward. What begins as fascination slowly becomes a mirror that reflects the hunger to be seen and the loneliness that follows when you finally are.
The film almost didn’t make it to cinemas. After being rated X twice, it was finally given an R-18 by the MTRCB. That back-and-forth says a lot about who gets to be visible in Philippine cinema. A story about trans desire was nearly hidden again. The censorship ends up mirroring the film’s own struggle, which is to be seen but only through someone else’s filter. In the end, the controversy says less about the movie and more about this country’s discomfort with seeing trans intimacy treated as ordinary life.
“Dreamboi” can’t help but preach. It throws everything it believes onto the screen, sometimes all at once. There are long monologues, quick tonal shifts, and bursts of visual poetry that blur the message. But the chaos feels honest. Singh’s ideas come from somewhere urgent, including her frustration, exhaustion, and the push and pull between pride and shame. Even when the film stumbles, you can feel what she’s reaching for.
Diwa’s search for a comfort room becomes the film’s quiet center and its most poignant metaphor. At work, she is constantly reminded that even the most ordinary human need is a political act, a source of micro-aggression that forces her to negotiate her own right to exist in public space. The tension is momentarily relieved when she hears about a restroom tucked away in B6, a spot so hidden it becomes a mythical refuge. The reality of the room itself is less important than its meaning. What matters is the quiet, fleeting moment in which she finally claims a temporary sanctuary where her identity is not contested, and she is simply allowed to exist.
Reality and imagination in the film blend until it’s hard to tell them apart. That feels right. For many trans women, survival starts in imagination. You picture the version of yourself the world hasn’t caught up to yet and learn to live there in the meantime.
What makes “Dreamboi” feel new is its radical subtlety in treating desire. Singh refuses to frame it as a scandal. She portrays it as something essential as the air itself. This quiet approach allows the film to reflect the often-unspoken realities of how transition reshapes intimacy for trans women, the shifting emotional rhythms, the new complexities of attraction, and the growth of self-confidence that comes from finally living authentically. The film succeeds because it simply bears witness to the complexity of a desire fulfilled.
The film is uneven, but it’s hard to resent it. Watching it feels like being invited into Singh’s own journey, fragments of thought and feeling collected without worrying if they all match. “Dreamboi” plays like a scrapbook, or maybe a diary, full of pretty things that don’t always belong together but somehow make sense when seen side by side. You don’t correct someone’s diary. You just listen. Even when it stumbles, you feel the courage it takes to show it at all.
By the time it ends, “Dreamboi” has built its own kind of comfort room, a space carved out of noise, fear, and longing. It isn’t perfect, but it’s there, and that’s enough. Singh leaves the door open, as if telling us that comfort, like visibility, is something we build together.