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In the tangled dreamscape of Nacho Vigalondo’s long-awaited return to cinema, Daniela Forever, one can catch fleeting glimpses of brilliance — surrealist tableaus that shimmer like fragments of a memory not quite fully formed. These moments arrive with a tremble of promise, a whisper that we might be entering one of those rare films where science fiction penetrates the tender core of human emotion, illuminating grief through speculative machinery. And yet, as the film unfolds — or, more accurately, unspools in loops, cul-de-sacs, and thematic potholes — it becomes painfully clear: this is not Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind redux. It’s a haunted house of unrealized ideas, and Vigalondo, a filmmaker of undeniable vision, seems to have misplaced the key to its deeper rooms.
Eight years have passed since Vigalondo’s idiosyncratic Colossal, a genre-defying creature feature that smuggled metaphors for addiction and emotional abuse inside the kaiju film format. That movie was messy, yes, but its mess had shape and sting. Daniela Forever wants for that same coherence, that audacity. Instead, it leaves us with the uncanny sensation of a dream that refuses to mean anything after we wake.
At its core, the premise holds uncanny promise: Henry Golding, finally given a dramatic showcase that diverges from his usual romantic charm, plays Nicolas, a grief-stricken DJ in Madrid mourning the sudden death of his girlfriend, Daniela (played with glinting opacity by The White Lotus’s Beatrice Grannò). Time has become viscous for Nicolas. Dishes pile up. The windows close in. In a clever stylistic choice by cinematographer Jon D. Dominguez, reality is rendered in a boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio, filmed with the flat grain of old VHS tape — as if the world itself is a memory deteriorating in storage.
Enter the science fiction hook: a pharmaceutical experiment that allows participants to enter a lucid dream state where they can reconstruct the dead from memory. Unlike Eternal Sunshine, which sought to erase pain, Daniela Forever asks: What if we could live inside it forever?
But even that question begins to dissolve.
The conceit — lovers reuniting inside a fragile hallucination of the past — aches with potential. Vigalondo even smartly leans into the epistemological horror of grief: that our memories are incomplete, selective, unreliable. One stunning sequence depicts Nicolas and Daniela realizing that their dream-city can only be constructed from remembered places — avenues terminate in smudged grey voids where Nicolas’s memory fails. It’s a gorgeous visual metaphor for the limits of mourning. The dead live only where we’ve already been with them. There is no forward.
And yet, for all its cerebral scaffolding, Daniela Forever crumbles under the weight of its own ambition. The film doesn’t deepen — it spirals. What begins as a meditation on grief and memory becomes a narrative ouroboros, eating its own tail in service of a structure that favors confusion over insight.
Much of the problem lies in the script, also penned by Vigalondo. The rules of the dream technology — how the pills work, how memory is accessed, what constitutes “control” — seem to change with each scene. We’re told early on that dreams can only include what Nicolas remembers, but later dream-Daniela appears to act independently, questioning Nicolas, suggesting thoughts and desires not drawn from his past but from some invented future. Has she gained consciousness, Her-style? Or is this just Nicolas’s subconscious playing tricks? Vigalondo dangles this question tantalizingly — and then forgets to answer it. Instead of deepening the ethical complexity, the screenplay pulls away.
There’s an evident tension between what the film wants to be and what it is. In certain frames, it aspires to the chilly metaphysics of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a mechanical metaphor for agency and control. In others, it wishes to breathe the wounded intimacy of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine. But where those films maintained their thematic integrity even as they bent time and memory, Daniela Forever fractures under pressure. Scenes don’t escalate; they meander. Stakes vanish. By the film’s second half, the viewer — like Nicolas — is trapped in a dream that feels more like a narrative cul-de-sac than an emotional crucible.
Golding, for his part, gives a valiant performance, stretching the performative muscles we don’t often see him flex. His Nicolas is sullen, erratic, even manipulative — a man so consumed by grief that he’d rather control a dream woman than face the chaos of real life. It’s a powerful character concept, but the film never musters the courage to interrogate his toxicity. The narrative flirts with danger — the possibility that Nicolas has turned his lover into a puppet — but backs away from confrontation. We’re left with murky waters instead of clarity, repression masquerading as nuance.
Grannò, too, is left stranded. Her dream-self hints at an evolving identity — at one point challenging Nicolas’s assumptions, as though a ghost might rewrite her own past. But the script does not follow through. Her arc drowns in conceptual noise. Is she real, remembered, or merely projected? The film, to its detriment, refuses to choose.
There are moments of visual bravura that almost redeem the descent: Nicolas striding through a dream, untouched by cars and pedestrians who bounce off him like he’s untouchable, or the glitchy unreality of familiar faces rendered wrong under dream-logic lighting. These moments are striking, even haunting. But they are islands in a fog.
The ultimate irony of Daniela Forever is that, for a film about lucidity, it is never clear about itself. It offers gestures toward profound ideas — the commodification of grief, the ethics of control, the fallibility of memory — but leaves them scattered like unsorted photographs in a shoebox. There is no emotional climax, no reckoning. Instead, Vigalondo lets the film dissolve into narrative ambiguity, not in the artful mode of, say, Tarkovsky or Kaufman, but in a way that feels like surrender.
Science fiction has always been a vessel for mourning — a genre built not just on technological wonder, but existential terror. Daniela Forever has the architecture of a great sci-fi elegy, but none of its interior depth. It's a film of locked doors and broken mirrors, waiting for someone to step through and make sense of the wreckage.
In the end, Daniela Forever is not so much a failure as it is a heartbreak — a film with dozens of luminous ideas and no map to guide them home. It's a sorrowful echo of its own themes: a dream of love, repeated, distorted, and finally lost to forgetting.
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