Daniela Forever had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 3 Mar 2025
Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s Daniela Forever opens with a title card in red cursive text, except that the squared-off frame in which it appears cuts off most of the capital D from the first word, and the e, r and half the v from the last word – until Academy ratio is replaced by widescreen, and the full title appears, wholly legible without the viewer having to fill the ellipses with what they know or can guess.
It is an important introduction to a film which is all about occluded views, limited perspectives and bigger pictures. The point is underlined by what follows: a prologue in which Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) narrates her first memory of Nicolás (Henry Golding). She claims to have first cast eyes on him at a set he was DJing in Madrid – much to the surprise of Nicolás himself, who did not realise that she had seen him before what he thought was their meet-cute at the gig’s afterparty. “It kind of feels like I’ve been wandering around this city with my eyes half-closed,” Nicolás tells Daniela just before their first kiss back at his apartment, in words that will accurately describe not just his past, but his future activities.
As we watch these early memories, we are also eavesdropping on the couple discussing them after the event and comparing notes – and even that conversation is not ‘in real time’, but a composite of memories, remixed by the DJ long after any of these words were exchanged. For Daniela has recently died in a car accident, leaving Nicolás to pick up the pieces and to despair over her absence – until his friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) suggests that he sign up for an experimental drug that induces a lucid dream state as a form of therapy. From the start, Nicolás messes up the prescribed treatment, and finds himself spending every night in an inchoate Madrid of the mind, where Daniela is still very much a presence. As time passes, this dreamscape becomes more fully formed, as the gaps in Nicolás’ memory are supplemented by his daily research and imagination. Daniela too, initially robot-like in her responses, becomes a more fleshed-out, independent human being, even one who goes against Nicolás’ will, rekindling her relationship with old flame Teresa (Aura Garrido) behind his back, and starting to create her own new works as an artist.
Daniela Forever repeatedly switches from the reality of Nicolás’ diurnal life, presented in narrow Academy ratio, to his nocturnal adventures, presented in widescreen to reflect their freer, more fanciful nature. For like the protagonist of Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (1997), Nicolás is navigating an oneiric alternate Madrid built on recollection and wish fulfilment, where his every fantasy can be realised as though he were a god. Yet paradoxically this place also becomes an arena for his conflicting anxieties and desires. For frequently the sound of speeding cars and screeching tyres disrupts the environment, conjuring the lingering trauma of Daniela’s death. Meanwhile Nicolás is caught between wanting to control Daniela and the world he once shared with her, bending both to his needy will – something which at times he does with selfish, gaslighting glee – and wanting her to be her own person, as autonomous and challenging as she once was.
Accordingly Daniela Forever is a post-mortem romance, and a study in the peculiar processes of mourning, breakdown and recovery. It might seem to be one of those narratives in which, because nearly everything unfolds in its protagonist’s headspace, ‘nothing really happens’ – and yet what we are witnessing, from the inside, is a man moving from a sorrow so deep that he can only see his surroundings via a grey kind of tunnel vision, to a much wider view that allows him to summon up and envisage a world which, though entirely solipsistic, is rich enough both to accommodate the feelings that he struggles to articulate in real life, and to keep existing as a free-floating repository of memories that no longer need him or his sometimes miraculous, sometimes baleful input to retain their half-life. Here, what once was always was. Nicolás goes from clinging to the past, even from recreating it in his own narcissistic image (an idea literalised in the film’s one sex scene, where he has threesome with Daniela and his own double), to just letting the past be (and be itself) and learning to wake up to whatever new thing the future may hold for him. And so, as with his previous features like Timecrimes (2007), Extraterrestrial (2011), Open Windows (2014) and Colossal (2016), Vigalondo deploys genre tropes to explore and intensify moral, psychological issues familiar to us all from our everyday human existence. In this fictive scenario, we, like Nicolás, will see what we want and need to see.
On his apartment wall, Nicolás keeps a print of Daniela’s depicting two figures seated opposite one another. The placement of the chairs, close yet apart, suggests the setting of a consultation, although the faces of both therapist and patient are kept outside of the frame. Like the part-obscured opening title, or Nicolás’ at times blinkered view of the world, this invites viewers to extrapolate a bigger picture that it also denies them – and places us, too, in the therapist’s chair. For Daniela Forever ultimately offers a cathartic form of therapy for its audience as much as for its protagonist, dreaming up lucid city-scale playgrounds on screen in which we can work through our own issues of grief and guilt, loneliness and longing. After all, perhaps what we lose does exist forever, just out of mind and out of sight.
strap: Good mo(u)rning: Nacho Vigalondo’s post-mortem romance remaps Madrid as a solipsistic space in which grief, memory, imagination and desire collide
© Anton Bitel
