Over the years, cinema has cooked up some ingenious ways to delineate “real life” from something else. Crossing over from Kansas to Oz, Dorothy stepped into full color. A Matter of Life and Death went the other direction, rendering life on earth in Technicolor and heaven in boring old black & white. In this latest film from Spain’s Nacho Vigalondo, the dream world is rendered in high-definition, while day-to-day living looks like a cruddy 80s educational film – grainy, squared-off, depressingly analog.
Makes sense – in the real world, Madrid-based DJ Nicolas (Golding, watering down his usual charisma) is gray with grief, having lost his girlfriend Daniela (Grannò) to a car accident. In an effort to get over his lost love, Nicolas joins an experimental drug trial that unlocks for him a world of lucid dreaming, but the drug has the opposite effect. In his dream world – vivid, near-tactile in its realness, and subject to his every whim – Nicolas picks right back up with Daniela. Well, sorta: Nicolas, and the film, never shy away from the sad fact that this is not actually Daniela, but rather, a version of Daniela entirely concocted by Nicolas’ memory of their shared life and his imagination of what their shared future might look like.
In his first feature film since 2016’s Colossal, Vigalondo delivers another head trip, and in contrast to that film’s dizzy-making premise, in which a troubled psyche conjures a kaiju a continent over, Daniela Forever is instantly plausible: Between virtual reality and artificial intelligence, we’re already engaging with facsimiles that feel dangerously close to the real thing.
If anything, Daniela Forever feels overly familiar. Calling to mind other life-of-the-mind films, it suffers by comparison, falling short of the wowee-zowee visuals of Waking Life, the satisfyingly intricate mechanics of Inception, the soulfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Certainly, the lack of soulfulness is by design. There’s an ugly truth at the core of the seemingly romantic premise – that what Nicolas is doing is actually really gross. He’s a god, conjuring a version of his beloved tailored entirely to his needs, and he’s a monster, essentially rebooting her whenever she develops her own agency and inner life. Even as Daniela Forever turns more hallucinatory in its last act, it’s quite plain that this is all amounting to a portrait in toxic masculinity. That Colossal reached the same conclusion only adds to the faint feeling of been-there, done-that.
This article appears in July 11 • 2025.
