Daniela Forever Movie Review

While watching, do not “adjust your set” or feel the need to​.

Cinematographer Jon D. Domínguez attempts to alter your mind by throwing you off. He wants you to feel you need to see what’s wrong with your Wi-Fi or your television. He uses black screens and the freezing of a scene for extended periods to give you the impression you’ve lost your bearings. It works and reminds you of films such as Memento and Inception. That said, however much director Nacho Vigalondo wants you to continue making comparisons to these incredible films, flashes such as these are about all we get.

The film begins with Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) telling Nicolás (Henry Golding) her first memory of him. An issue I had with the movie overall is that it feels off. It’s as if we’re watching the second half of the movie first, which stretches on too long, and we never get to feel the build-up of what must have been a great relationship. We’re not properly introduced to the characters, and it’s difficult to sympathize with Nicolás if you don’t feel the exceptional love he’s missing out on when it ends. Daniela was in an accident and was killed. Nicolás can’t get beyond her death. He’s depressed. His friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) is tired of his suffering. She knows of a study he can participate in, where, hopefully, he can take the next step to move on and live his life again. She desperately wants to see her friend happy as he once was.

He agrees to be involved in this clinical study, which consists of administering an experimental drug to induce a lucid dream state. It’s ultimately supposed to help him overcome his emotional dependency on her, but instead, he learns to manipulate the system. The deeper he delves, the more he discovers, much like scrolling through his phone, how to find Daniela and make her do and say what he wants to see and hear. He refuses to grow, but instead, stays in the place he always wants to be. If you were offered the opportunity to be with the one you love, the one who is suddenly taken away, never to be seen again, would you take it? Nicolás is given that chance and takes advantage of it. He’s supposed to be dreaming so he can move on from what keeps him down, not live in the past. He’s to tell the scientist what he’s experiencing, but he has to lie to keep the study going. But he’s running out of time.

Daniel Forever can be slightly confusing at times. Are we in the real world or a dream? Cleverly, the cinematographer uses aspect ratio (smaller width and height) for his reality and uses full screen when he’s in his dream state, where he’s happier, so you see him more clearly. Doing this helps you realize which state you’re watching. Eventually, you know that he no longer wishes to be a part of the real world. He imagines gray walls moving in on him, a somewhat metaphysical examination of his life, which never moved beyond a certain point. They show up when he’s about to enter a part of the world he has yet to see. When he learns to manipulate these, expanding and contracting them, but also seeing their limitations, he no longer wants to explore life at all. He wants to stay in this funk and never move forward.

The film is deep and at moments fascinating. I wanted to like it more, but the relationship it’s based on isn’t correctly depicted. If there had been something for me to grab onto there, I would have liked this much more. The acting is generally dry, and the story lacks a compelling reason to warrant a watch. Check it out on streaming, if you like creative cinematography, which this has, but the storyline is too all over the place to suggest a must-see. It wanted to be so much more and I wish it could have reached that goal.