After abandoning her life as a sex worker in Manila, transgender woman Donna (played by filmmaker Isabel Sandoval) retreats to a quieter existence in a small town where she is raising her 12-year-old foster son Tomas and working on the campaign of an honest and idealistic underdog mayoral candidate. The discovery that a powerful and ruthless former client is the puppet master pulling the strings of the corrupt opposition spurs her to make provocative moves on the campaign trail and to return to the bed of a man she despises as she uses her sexual wiles as part of a perilous gambit to take him down.

Sandoval’s debut feature expands on her 2009 short, also titled Señorita (Frameline34), with a heady blend of sex and politics. In this sun-drenched neo-noir, the femme fatale is recast as the heroine, boldly challenging the powers that be at the risk of her own skin. Donna is a complex character, warm and sympathetic, but not without flaws. Her well-meant actions have consequences, for the candidate she supports and more crucially for herself and Tomas, as she inadvertently endangers their lives. Both a thriller and a melodrama, on the surface this is a sexy, suspenseful entertainment that digs deeper as Sandoval explores the nature of power, its allure, its uses, its abuses and its limits.