The 19th-century culture critic Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. With Khavn de la Cruz’s feature Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore, cinema, an art born in the previous century, aspires to the condition of a mixtape.

Set in Manila’s seedy underworld, Ruined Heart has no real plot and almost no dialogue. What it presents instead are sequences (often violent, often erotic, always impressionistic) set to different kinds of tunes. Sometimes it’s neo new wave, or classic roots reggae, or Asian opera, or Filipino pop, or American rock, and so on. Each track is in one way or another concerned with love. The film is indeed a great mixtape.

Ruined Heart also has amazing images, and with very good reason: They were shot by Christopher Doyle, the Australian cinematographer who first achieved fame in the 1990s with the movies of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai. In fact, the film’s colors, motion, and boldness recall and even surpass Wong’s Fallen Angels, and this is impressive because Doyle shot that film more than 20 years ago, when he was in his early 40s. He is now in his early 60s and seems to be more in love with his art than ever before. There is not one scene or image in Ruined Heart that will not break a lover’s heart. Even the one with come on a whore’s face is simply stunning.