The death of a loved one is fundamental to the human condition, with the ensuing grief making way for an odyssey of pain and acceptance. Overcoming that loss and cherishing memories of a partner is one thing that makes life on this fleeting world so valuable, yet there will always be those who cannot let go, with recent reports of people turning to AI to effectively keep a family member alive through a digital facsimile. Writer/Director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Colossal) mines similar territory for his latest film, Daniela Forever, only here he turns to lucid dreaming to study a man who wants to keep a lover alive after she was ripped away from him. Caught somewhere between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inception, and a middling Black Mirror episode, Daniela Forever aims to process grief in a fantasy world, and while there are a few neat visual flourishes to be found down this path, the project is dramatically inert, determining only that the process of letting go is shockingly muddled the longer it drags on. It’s an especially frustrating turn from a filmmaker who has consistently turned in strong work before.
Nicolas (Henry Golding) is a club DJ residing in Madrid, still reeling from the loss of his partner, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò, perhaps best known from Season 2 of The White Lotus), whose life was cruelly cut short in a tragic automobile accident. Despite a small support system of friends, Nicolas is having a hard time letting go, determining existence to be no longer bearable. One such friend is Victoria (Nathalie Poza), who lets him in on a radical new experimental treatment involving lucid dreaming to help move on from his pain. At her recommendation, Nicolas heads to the Swedish pharmaceutical research center Goossens & Mertens, where he finds the grieving man to be a viable candidate for their experiment to help him cope with his grief. Given a month’s supply of pills and a script to guide him into the world of lucid dreaming, Nicolas inadvertently damages the script, opting to instead visualize Daniela in his dreams, providing false reports to Goossens & Mertens. In the lucid world, Nicolas reunites with Daniela, restoring comfort to his life as he fills his dreams with memories of the places they’d been and the things they’ve done. As Nicolas works to maintain tight control of his newfound world, he finds that Daniela may be slipping away for good, especially when a third party in the form of Teresa (Aura Garrido), who was also a close friend of Daniela’s, gets involved and gums up the works.
Lest one perceive an intentional blurring of fiction and reality in some bid for heightened genrefying, Vigalondo does attempt to play fair by utilizing different formats to center his narrative. Nicolas in the “real world” is presented in the Academy ratio, photographed on what looks to be a consumer-grade digital camera, largely popularized by the medium after the turn of the millennium. The “lucid dreaming” Nicolas exists in the lush world of CinemaScope, exploring the Spanish capital with Daneila through a vibrant, saturated color palette. The lucid world offers a few more stylized elements as well, including a character who appears to be lit by sunlight despite sitting in a darkened nightclub, and more important is the presence of the “grey walls,” which render places Nicolas has not seen or visited as a blob of viscous liquid, effectively confining him to his memories. Nicolas eventually learns to control his dreams, turning into a superhero of sorts as cars harmlessly bounce off him, characters can appear and disappear at will, and he can even go so far as to control the passage of time, keeping the pace of travel and conversation to his liking.
The longer Nicolas’ experiment goes on, the more perplexing Daniela Forever becomes. Running nearly two hours, Vigalondo does not seem to have much of an endgame in store for his film, which fizzles out after the hour mark and drags itself to a cop-out of an ending. The premise eventually twists into a snake eating its own tail, as there is no real logical conclusion for the film to arrive at when the entire story takes place inside the central character’s head. Lead performances are also slightly underwhelming, with Golding proving to be a rather bland protagonist here, whose ultimate crusade ultimately feels more creepy than charming. Grannò brings a bit more energy to her part, but she’s unfortunately saddled with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl part, quite literally so in the sense that all we ever learn about her stems solely from Nicolas’ dreams. As far as heady films that exist in the slipstream of sci-fi and realism go, Vigalondo has excelled in this department before, but Daniela Forever is patently disappointing, an especially regrettable outcome given how timely its concept is to our present.
DIRECTOR: Nacho Vigalondo; CAST: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Rubén Ochandiano; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: July 11; STREAMING: July 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
Comments are closed.