The Garden Of Earthly Delights

Whenever there exists an abyss between rich and poor, it is because someone has built a bridge meant to be crossed in only one direction.
Arundhati Roy

Religion is everywhere, a distorted scenography: a decapitated crucifix, the Lord’s Prayer recited while taking drugs. The streets are full of children lying on pieces of cardboard. Drugs — methamphetamine above all — serve to endure. They produce hallucinations of fake paradises: orchids blooming among garbage.

The film records, without embellishment, the logic of the market: everything is sellable. Cigarettes, Viagra, Xanax, dwarfs, catalog-listed children, underage girls. Any perversion finds a price. And around them move tourists, mostly white men, American or European: buyers who keep the mechanism running.

Meanwhile, a Dutch tourist, Michael, betrayed by a Filipina woman he met online, slips into the dark world of the red-light district. When the trajectories intersect, the abyss of poverty, desire, despair, and human commodification generates a tragic conflict between innocence, guilt, and survival.

The title — evocative, loaded with irony — transforms the “garden” into a moral dystopia, a visionary park corrupted by the brutality of capital and global inequalities: those “fruits” and “delights” are not paradises, but commodities. Knibbe leaves no space for consolatory beauty: every scene — from meth highs to prostitution, from urban decay to sexual exchanges with Western tourists — composes a disturbing mosaic of exploitation, abyss, and loss. In this context, poverty is not only a condition of misery, but a currency for perversions sold and bought with indifference.

The story slips into the darkest hell: Liwa, a little girl, dies. Ginto ends up in prison in a mass of overlapping bodies, even more hostile for drug users and gay men. Asia dreams of leaving; she has saved money, but two hundred thousand pesos are needed to free Ginto. The impossible dream collapses.

Ginto asks her: “How much do you get per person?” She silences him, telling him never to ask her that again. It is the definitive formula of the economics of abuse.

This “garden” is the poisoned fruit of a global capitalism that has transformed pain, identity, and life itself into consumable flesh: for money, for pleasure, for domination. The contrast between Western privilege, embodied by most of the white men, and the postcolonial misery of Ginto and Asia makes the structural root of oppression explicit.

The film confronts with raw intensity themes such as gender identity and sexuality — young Ginto, “labeled” as effeminate, “faggot” according to street insults, tries to survive in a world that sees him only as a body to exploit or absorb. When his inner exploration — the need for affection, recognition, truth, identity — collides with the systemic demand for bodies sold and bodies used, the conflict becomes tragedy. It is not just a single existence buried by misery, but an epochal condition: a global marginality that silently deprives children of childhood, identity, dignity, and any glimmer of future.

Every liberating aesthetic in the film is deceptive: drugs, alcohol-fueled nights, clubs, flights from horror — everything is fleeting, everything is illusory. The “visions of paradise” — orchids blooming on concrete, mental escapes — are not harmless fantasies, but desperate psychotic shortcuts against an unbearable present.

The film closes with a reversal: the fate of the Dutch tourist, who arrived in Manila searching for Sunny and for the child, takes an unexpected and brutal turn. The logic of the market spares no one, not even those who believe they can cross it as external observers.

As Knibbe himself says, the film is neither voyeurism nor spectacle for its own sake: it is a political act, a call for awareness that forces the viewer not to remain unmoved. The film engraves a system: poverty as commodity, childhood as resource, queer as target, Western desire as engine. Those who watch — like those who consume exploitation — bear a responsibility: it is not enough to see misery; one must question one’s own complicity, the distance between one’s privileged position and the global abyss. In a world where “privilege means turning away,” silence becomes part of oppression.

Humanity is not divided between those who have power and those who do not: it is divided between those who suffer power without understanding it and those who exercise it without questioning it.
Michel Foucault

And beauty itself — the images, the acting, the cinematography — is not enough: it becomes deceptive if it does not expose the system that produces it.

The film is powerful, visually and narratively — photographs of despair, ruptures of violence that hit both stomach and conscience.

And yet, there is the risk — evident — of a representation that, oscillating between realism and brutalism, may at times seem “effect.” The horror of denied childhood, of child prostitution, of a little girl’s death — in a context of multiple abuse — can be so extreme as to become the symbol of a “total hell.” In this way, Ginto risks being sublimated as an “emblem of misery,” rather than representing a complex subject. The critique of the everyday becomes universal tragedy — but perhaps at the cost of sacrificing nuances of individuality, agency, resistance.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a film that unsettles. It begins with a caption — “impressionable material — sexual exploitation” — and offers no relief. It is denunciation, mirror, burning testimony.

In a world in which the global economy feeds on poverty, in which vulnerable bodies become merchandise — children, young women, queer bodies — Knibbe offers us a mirror.

Because this Garden is no Eden: it is a hell built by indifference.

We are responsible for what we are — but also for what we let happen.
Jean-Paul Sartre