What a lovely film is Daniela Forever, the latest effort from Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo, starring Henry Golding and Beatrice Grannò as the titular character. Vigalondo’s last feature as writer-director was 2016’s Colossal, which found Anne Hathaway clairvoyantly mind-linked to a gigantic city-stomping kaiju monster. Daniela Forever operates from a science-fanciful premise that is slightly less strange, but more gracefully executed:
Nick (Golding) takes a drug that can induce lucid dreaming, making his dreams into a kind of controllable virtual reality, so that he can re-experience contact with his beloved girlfriend Daniela, who recently died in a tragic car accident.
So it’s a story that could get weird in a couple ways, and it does. It’s Golding’s performance that quickly grabs you by conveying Nick’s abyssal sense of loss, which becomes a kind of madness. The science-fiction romance aspects are in the territory of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, What Dreams May Come, Blade Runner 2049, but Nick and Daniela’s story is more intriguingly about how dreams truly work, as opposed to how trippy they may look.
Grannò (Mia in The White Lotus Season 2) is excellent in the title role, doing a tricky balancing act: Daniela for much of the film is a literal dream woman (subject to Nick’s remote-control dream-editing whims), but she’s also actual Daniela, an Italian-born visual artist living in Madrid. The Nick-centric perspective gets subverted in a few clever ways, as his attempts to rearrange memories in the lucid dreamspace result in unexpected branching points. Although Daniela’s death is the mournful core note, we also get to relive the two pretty folks falling in love. There’s an endearing chemistry in the scene where they concoct cosplays as a vampire and a “shark with gun.” They connect over music and art and homesickness, as two expats will do.
Daniela Forever really succeeds in crafting a dreamworld that is not excessively dreamy. Surreal imagery happens, but it’s not all about astral unicorn-chasing or brain-melting environments. Instead, Vigalondo emphasizes the emotional clarity of dreamscapes, wherein you get to see what’s truly on your (unconscious) mind. The magical-realist moments are subtle yet affecting: shifts in aspect ratio, unnatural lighting to suggest a differentiation of day people from night people. Within the dream scenes, the visual effects are not Avengers-level in detail, but they are entirely effective. One whimsical sequence has Nick walking down a busy street, lost in thought, solipsistic and invulnerable as people and cars bounce off him. (The gag, plus Golding’s slightly-otherworldly aura, makes a good case for Golding to play Superman, should the multiverse ever require it in the future, I’m just thinking out loud.)
Through it all, Golding and Grannò’s performances elevate past the standard conventions of rom-coms and “dream sequence” stories. Golding’s understated acting is grounded and truthful. Occasionally, he channels the late Robin Williams, who embodied the unfortunate trope of “grieving for a deceased partner” in so many heartbreaking and justly famous roles. The supporting cast also shines: Nathalie Poza plays Victoria, the friend who introduces Nick to the dream drug, with both empathy and an agenda. Aura Garrido does stellar work as Theresa, Daniela’s previous lover/partner. Nick and Daniela’s conversations about Theresa and lingering jealousy feel very natural, and lead to the third act’s rather surprising and poignant resolution.
As in Colossal, the setup is supernatural, but the story doesn’t spend an overlong time indulging a hero/power fantasy. The science fiction device exists to help examine a human fallibility. Nick’s gradual slip toward obsessiveness comes as we learn that the lucid-dreaming drug trial is aimed at treating “emotional dependency.” Nick starts to show drug-seeking behavior and his dream manipulations veer toward self-serving and sinister as he desperately tries to avoid reverting “back to my own stupid self.”
In Nick’s plight, the film captures another familiar truth about dreaming: The moment of waking up from a nice dream can be maddening.
A last note: Catalan pop group Hidrogenesse does Daniela Forever‘s evocative score. The end credits feature a version of their song “Escolata la Tempesta” sung by Grannò. (Folks may remember her performing “That’s Amore” in The White Lotus.) It’s a haunting coda, appropriate to a tenderly-crafted movie that sustains its bittersweet spell right up to its very end.
Daniela Forever is currently playing at selected theaters.