‘ConMom’ (2025) Netflix Movie Review - A Mother in Disguise, a Heart Caught in Between

From its opening moments, ConMom stakes its claim not as a blockbuster spectacle but as a quiet tugging at what family demands us to be resilient, foolish, loving, and stubborn. Director Noah Tonga leans into small moments: the sighs, the costumes, the sun-drenched beauty of Boljoon, Cebu. This film isn’t trying to dazzle with action; it wants you to feel close to the ache and the hope, and for the most part, it succeeds.

Kaye Abad plays Pinky with earnestness. She’s immediately sympathetic: you feel her loss and her longing. After discovering her husband Anton has been unfaithful and a child of his mistress complicates everything, Pinky is barred from seeing Yana. The film roots itself in that conflict: a mother’s love, yes, but one made chaotic by betrayal, pride, social expectation, and the limits placed on her by divorce and custody. Rather than turn to courtroom drama, ConMom chooses disguise and caper-style scenes as tools: Pinky enlists male friends who feel like siblings in onscreen chemistry to help her impersonate balloon vendors, department-store heroes, even mermen at the beach, anything to cross thresholds that society or Anton won’t let her breach. The disguises are absurd; they are funny, sometimes forced, and occasionally touching.

The film’s setting, Boljoon, with its old church, coastal vistas, and quiet town life, becomes almost a character itself. It grounds the story: when Pinky sneaks in as a balloon seller outside a church or hides behind elderly shoppers in a supermarket, the setting adds weight. You believe this is somewhere real, somewhere that feels vulnerable and beautiful at once. The opening parallel with Ibong Adarna (a street play, Calamansi, wounds, sacrifice) signals from the start that this story will be about sacrifice, love, and doing the absurd for someone you can’t stop caring for.

There’s room for laughter. The male friends’ disguises and Pinky’s elaborate rigging of scenarios have comic payoff. There’s warmth when they fumble a wig, or when Pinky’s high drama meets the mundanity of town life. It’s relatable: mothers doing what they can, sometimes looking silly (or foolish), but never without conviction. The performances are strong: Kaye Abad brings heart, the ensemble supports her, and the reunion of Abad, Paolo Contis, and Patrick Garcia (nostalgic for many who remember their earlier work together) carries an understated emotional resonance.

That said, ConMom is not blind to its flaws. The comedic disguises, while meant to be charming, sometimes stray toward clumsy. A few scenes are overlong. The “big airport plot” moment, for example, feels heavy with expectations, but loses some nimbleness: you sense what it’s aiming for, but it trips over its pacing. Some humor feels like it tries too hard, stretching what might have been a tender scene into something more showy at times. The film undercuts its own emotional beats with slapstick or wig jokes that don’t land as cleanly. Critics have pointed out that, though the core story is familiar (estranged parent, custody issues, separation), ConMom pads its march toward emotional peaks with sequences that feel less necessary than entertaining.

The film’s treatment of the mother’s challenges is heartfelt but sometimes uneven. Pinky’s sacrifices and desperation are clear, but there are moments where one wishes the script gave her more agency beyond disguise work: how much must she endure, how much must she degrade herself, so to speak, to see her child? There are choices she makes that feel emotionally logical, others perhaps more contrived for dramatic effect. The tension between wanting realism and wanting spectacle emerges: some parts you believe fully, others you see the strings.

Yet these critiques don’t derail ConMom’s bigger mission. It’s a film about what mothers endure when direct paths are blocked. It’s about how identity, shame, and love intersect. It’s about community: the friends who help, the town that becomes backdrop and anchor. It leans into Filipino culture myths, childhood stories, the weight of family expectation, and doesn’t shy away from showing both its beauty and its burden.

Visually and tonally, ConMom balances between melodrama and comedy. The lens lingers on waves, on open skies, on moments of stillness before emotional confrontations. The music, the dialogues, nothing feels overly polished; instead, the imperfections help. When Pinky puts on a wig or tries on yet another disguise, the film doesn’t mock her. It honours her discomfort and her vulnerability.

By its end, ConMom doesn’t promise everything is fixed. There are bruises, literal and emotional. Relationships hang in the air. Some repairs are uncertain. But that uncertainty feels honest. The film doesn’t fake a perfect happy ending. Instead, it makes the case that sometimes love isn’t about resolution, but about persistence.

If you like films that combine laughter and tears without severing their ties, that show how motherhood can bend but not break, ConMom is a worthwhile watch. It won’t always surprise, but its emotional core is strong, and its failures (when they happen) are mostly in service of what it wants to say: family, loss, display, disguise, and the lengths one goes when love demands it.

Final Score- [7.5/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times