Smaller and Smaller Circles is a movie that pins down to your core, consuming your flesh, spreading to your blood. You want to ignore it but you can’t — until you realize it’s a part of you that you can never get away with. It’s a truth you can’t escape. “Smaller and Smaller Circles” is a serial killer thriller set in the Philippines.

It’s about two Jesuit priests, also amateur sleuths, hunting a monster who is preying and murdering the country’s poorest and vulnerable pre-teen boys born into poverty.

Father Saenz and his junior partner Father Lucero connect the clues from defaced bodies found in garbage dumps, where boys that age and in that social state — “breadwinners” for their starving families — scavenge.

With a generally neglectful and often corrupt NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) less interested in these cases than you’d hope they’d be — as the investigator states “Father Saenz, you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies! There are no serial killers in the Philippines!” — pertaining to Gus Saenz (Nonie Buencamino) and history teacher and forward thinker Jerome Lucero (Sid Lucero) take it upon themselves and take over to unmask the killer.

Corruption is meant to be the big subtext in the film, particularly in the scene whereas Father Jerome lectured his students about the connection between Marcos Era Philippine excesses and the unaccountable Catholic Church.

Raya Martin – the director of the film, ingeniously injected the beauty of Cinematography, with the shots, angle, lighting that worked well with every scene.