Spoiler warning: This piece discusses major plot points, including the ending.
“Call Me Mother” has already been praised for its humor and heart, but what stayed with me was a single color in the final scene, a detail that quietly changed the way I understood everything that came before.
The film unfolds as a custody drama infused with spectacle and comedy, where color becomes its primary language. Yellow, red, and blue recur throughout, each carrying its own emotional weight.
Twinkle (Vice Ganda) radiates yellow. It is warmth, hope, and protective strength. For 10 years, she has raised Angelo, even as the life she’s trying to secure keeps slipping. Her yellow signals care sustained over time. Even so, there are limits to what that care can secure.
Angelo (Lucas Andalio) is red. His desires, his claim on the world, his restless energy all pulse in that color. When Mara (Nadine Lustre) buys him the red bike he has long wanted, she asserts her place in his life with devastating clarity. Twinkle, who has been saving for the same gift, watches in heartbreak. Her yellow, her care and devotion, cannot compete with the literal red he desires.
Mara wears blue through most of the film, a color of structure, authority, and controlled distance. That visual logic is shattered during the Miss UniWorld pageant, where she appears in a head-turning red, a color she has not touched until this high-stakes contest. By introducing this shade into her wardrobe just as she publicly identifies Angelo as her child, the film marks a shift in her role. Red, once Angelo’s alone, becomes hers. The revelation fractures the bond Angelo has shared with Twinkle for 10 years. The glamour fades, and the moment hardens into a contest over care and belonging.
That contest quickly spirals into chaos. In the aftermath, Angelo is pulled into an accident that tears the spectacle apart and drags the story into its most private reckoning.
The hospital scene makes parenthood’s limits unmistakable. Angelo needs a blood transfusion, and the red of his blood marks the boundary Twinkle cannot pass. She has nurtured him, protected him, and loved him, but biology asserts itself. Her yellow, steady and protective, cannot reach beyond this line. The scene makes clear what effort alone can’t overcome.
By the time the story reaches Hong Kong, the film’s color language reaches its most profound articulation. Twinkle wears yellow accented with small splashes of red and blue, as if the colors of the two other central figures have been quietly woven into her presence. Angelo, still unmistakably red, wears a shirt striped with all three primary colors. He becomes an emblem of divided yet unified identity, nurtured by Twinkle, claimed by Mara, and pulled between them.
Mara, however, remains in blue. The choice reads less as costume than as statement, an insistence on distance, a refusal to enter the blend that Twinkle and Angelo suggest. In the film’s palette, her blue becomes a visual argument against co‑parenting and the messy coexistence the other two embody.
“Call Me Mother” doesn’t settle its colors. Twinkle stays yellow, touched now by red and blue. Angelo carries all three. Mara holds to her blue. They don’t merge, and the film never tries to make them. What lingers is how those colors remain in place, stubborn, unresolved, like the ties between them. Twinkle keeps holding on. Mara keeps her distance. Angelo keeps looking for where he belongs.
Motherhood here is not neat. It lives in the spaces where yellow reaches, red pulls, and blue holds back — where care and distance strain against one another.