Movies have been tied to dreams from the very beginnings of cinema. The storytelling medium lends itself to the interior world of dreaming. And films from “Spellbound” onward have made serious attempts to recreate and interpret the experience of what our subconscious does in the journeys we take when we dream.
“Daniela Forever” is a movie about grief, undying love and lucid dreaming as a way of clinging to someone you’ve lost. The latest sci-fi from Oscar nominated writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes,” “Colossal”) is a fascinating dip into lucid dreaming hampered by a DOA love story and the limitations of handsome but often emotionally unavailable leading man Henry Golding.
He plays a star DJ lured to Madrid by gigs set up by his poseur/manager (Rubén Ochandiano) but whose life is upended when he falls for an Italian artist, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) who then dies in a car accident.
The film’s central flaw is glaring and obvious right from the start. We have no time to invest in the romance, and even as the narrative gropes and meanders its way to a conclusion that maybe “explains” that, we have nothing to cling to but DJ Nicolas and his undying devotion to Daniela.
Golding can’t make the sale, and looking at his other romances, it’s a wonder that he keeps trying his hand at them. As the prospective groom in “Crazy Rich Asians,” he had better chemistry with his best man. Here, we just don’t buy how bereft and lovesick his character is supposed to be.
His friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) suggests he sign on for a drug trial that she’s been involved with. It’s being tested to see if this pill can enable directed lucid dreaming. Subjects are put on the medication, given instructions that amount to a “script,” what they should be trying to dream about, and then are intereviewed to see if this medication helps someone control their dreams.
Nicolas cheats. He only wants to dream Daniela back to life.
Nicolas enters these dreams in his apartment with Daniela, and ventures with her to where they met, places they went. He focuses on details, notices dead ends — limits to this dreamscape created by his lack of knowledge of this street, this shop (the suits on display have no backs, for instance).
“Everything I don’t know doesn’t exist.”
He tries to master this world and cling to Daniela, who is limited by how he remembers her and what he didn’t know about her. Her friend Teresa (Aura Garrido), whom he met at her funeral, might offer clues. But he’s so wrapped up in dreams that he lets everything in his waking life go.
“I think I get it now,” he tells Daniela, over and over again as he masters this somnambulent rule or that one. But does he?
Golding’s performance is flat, all surface affectations, none of them hinting at the obsession he allegedly has for this woman. Her elusive art — faceless characters, figures with their heads out of the frame, all composed on a computer — gets at the film’s superficiality.
The limits of her character, created from his memory, hamper Grannò, who does nothing to suggest the cause for obsession. She is a boring pixie dream girl.
The film’s one light touch is the one truncated love scene, picked up just as the menage a trois has ended, It’s the most comical and one of its most revealing moments.
But Golding has to carry this, and he just doesn’t. As fascinating as Vigalondo’s fantasy dreamscape with its rules — Nicolas can focus and alter where a door takes them, who they run into and the like — can be, “Daniela Forever” never escapes being a clock-watching romantic melodrama with intriguing sci-fi touches.
The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”
Rating: R, profanity, one sexual situation
Cast: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Nathalie Poza and Rubén Ochandiano
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:52
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