Nacho Vigalondo retreats to an unimaginative dream world for Daniela Forever

Yahoo

11-07-2025

There's a darker, more discomfiting film lurking at the fuzzy edges of Daniela Forever, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo's sci-fi-ish drama about the unfinished business of grief. Mourning the death of his girlfriend, a DJ named Nick (Henry Golding) is introduced by an old friend to a secret, experimental therapy program that promises a miracle cure for trauma and depression. It seems that some mysterious Belgian pharmaceutical company has developed a drug that induces lucid dreams, giving the sleeper potentially limitless access to their memories—provided, of course, that they stick to the text prompts supplied by the program. Nick quickly signs off on some threatening-sounding legal paperwork, collects his blister pack of magic pills, and, in tried-and-true cautionary-tale fashion, sets about disregarding the instructions he's been given, feeding the stern-looking company doctors stories about the childhood memories he's supposedly working through while he spends his nights in the dream world with his dead love, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò).
In Vigalondo's earlier Colossal, a writer's alcoholic self-loathing was manifested as a giant monster rampaging Godzilla-style through a city on the other side of the world. Here, the metaphors and projections are directed inward. A gimmicky formal boundary is drawn between Nick's waking life and the dream world: The former is shot in 4:3 aspect ratio in a washed-out, grainy format that taps the current vogue for vintage prosumer video aesthetics, while the latter is lensed in crisp, saturated widescreen.
Like so much in Daniela Forever, the idea is obvious. We are meant to understand that the world of Nick's lucid dreams is the more cinematic and attractive one, while reality is dishwater-dull. But in terms of alienation effects, the boxy low-res footage arguably looks more interesting—and, regardless, it all feels equally claustrophobic. The idea of controlling one's dreams and memories may suggest fluid, limitless potential, but the larger part of Daniela Forever is set around Nick's Madrid apartment and its immediate environs—a memory-palace dreamscape for the literal-minded post-pandemic, work-from-home era.
The more time Nick spends in the dream world, the more he learns to control it, summoning locations and characters from his memories, stopping and fast-forwarding time. (The fact that he is, in a way, DJing and remixing his memories is just one of several wasted throughlines.) He is also able to control the version of Daniela that he's created, wiping her thoughts, instructing her how to feel, and generally tweaking the 'manic' and 'pixie' settings on his dream girl. To his confusion and frustration, she seems to be developing an emotional life of her own.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense, and draws inevitable comparisons to far better and more emotionally imaginative films (the key references being Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Her), but Daniela Forever does introduce some tantalizingly uncomfortable ideas about loss and possessiveness—which is to say, is it really Daniela that Nick is yearning for, or a version of her that he can control in his head precisely because she's gone? This kind of extended metaphor doesn't have to be internally consistent. Our actual dreams certainly aren't. But as this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it's trying to critique.
Director: Nacho Vigalondo Writer: Nacho Vigalondo Starring: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Rubén Ochandiano, Nathalie Poza Release Date: July 11, 2025
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