"Daniela Forever Is A Dreamy Concept Lost in Repetition

"Daniela Forever" is an aggravating, listless inquiry into grief, obsession, and memory, less a watchable film than a slow dream you long to snap awake from. Nacho Vigalondo's latest is not inert so much as motionless, which, for a movie with an interesting concept and impressive ambitions, is far more frustrating. In these two long hours, he manages to miss on every level—emotional, narrative, and intellectual.

Henry Golding stars as Nicholas, a Madrid DJ who has recently lost his girlfriend Daniela to a bus accident, given the chance to take part in a clinical trial for a form of lucid dream therapy that sends him back into their relationship through a "pill for missing people". The movie flutters between these remembered (and distorted) dreams and Nicholas' real life, though it seldom lands on any revelatory point.

There's nothing wrong with Golding—surprisingly, his is one of the film's more restrained, even inward performances. The problem is the screenplay, threadbare and unimaginative, lacking any real sense of feeling or empathy. Vigalondo wants to be a 21st-century Michel Gondry, a contemporary Christopher Nolan, but what he assembles more closely resembles an undergraduate thesis bloated to two hours of tedium. It reduces the dream Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) to a literal fantasy—a manic pixie dream girl if ever there was one, there to be gazed at adoringly and make her interlocutor's solipsism palatable.

To begin with, there is no spark in the central relationship, an enormous problem for a film that wants to make a great deal of its two characters' supposed deep connection. It's also grossly one-sided in a way that does not reflect the film's stated ambitions: when Nicholas is in his dream, he has complete control over every facet of Daniela's life. She not only has no agency as a living person in the film, but she is not even allowed to have a memory when she dies. It's retrograde fantasy, even for a film that wants to be soulful.

Visually, there are points of interest. Vigalondo and cinematographer Jon D. Dominguez make excellent use of shifting aspect ratios and formats to track shifting points of reality and dreams, very elegantly partitioning off one world from the other. The Madrid locations are good, and there is an unflinching eeriness to both the antiseptic clinics and plastic nightclubs Nicholas visits.

All of that would be for naught without a film to back it up. Daniela Forever is a premise that demands something of an interiority or emotional payoff, whether psychological, spiritual, or cathartic, but instead finds tedium and indulgence. Vigalondo has little to say on the big topics of memory and mourning; he's made a film that wants to circle something unknowable, but instead circles round and round. It runs 118 minutes, but the movie's dream state overstays its welcome long before that.

Daniela Forever is a failure that mostly wants to be interesting, a shame, given that its heart looks rather lovely.

Final Grade "C-

"Daniela Forever" is available to rent on digital now.