Henry Golding plays your toxic dream man in ‘Daniela Forever’

Henry Golding plays Nicolás, a suave British techno DJ who’s just moved to Madrid. The movie’s opening scene depicts his first meeting with his eventual girlfriend Daniela (Beatrice Grannò), an up-and-coming painter. However, its surreal details and retrospective voiceover—by way of a conversation of the couple looking back on this meet-cute—tips us off to the fact that it’s a dream or a memory, something un-tethered from reality. The film’s colorful, widescreen aspect ratio shifts drastically when Nicolás wakes up from this hallucination, to a messy apartment in his now-constricted 4:3 world, rendered in the rough texture and desaturated palette of a late 20th Century home video.

Reality, for Nicolás, is drab and unpleasant. Daniela recently died in some sort of accident, sending him into a depressive spiral. To help him cope, a friend recommends an experimental new therapy, wherein a panel of scientists gives him a pill each night, meant to help him have self-aware dreams, on which he’s meant to report. However, despite re-living moments from his and Daniela’s life together—in vivid color—he tells these doctors a tall tale about where he’s actually going when he closes his eyes (though if this deception has any real consequences, it’s mostly unclear).

There’s an Inception-like quality to Vigalondo’s approach, in that Daniela Forever is concerned with the rules and logic of this dreamscape—for instance, the way unfamiliar locations in the couple’s neighborhood become obfuscated from view by way of gray fluids, reminiscent of an abstract oil painting. However, Christopher Nolan’s saga of lucid dreams was a heist film, which made its details-first approach necessary to follow its plot. Daniela Forever, on the other hand, has no real plot to speak of, beyond Nicolás starting to dream about Daniela every night. It’s a mood piece first and foremost, and when the mood is meant to be “mysterious”—Nicolás’ projection of Daniela becomes more independent and individualistic than he seems to intend—the film conceals no hidden truths or meanings.

Another film Daniela Forever resembles is the Zoe Kazan-penned romance Ruby Sparks, in which Kazan plays a fictional romantic interest come to life, by way of an author’s typewriter. What begins, in Ruby Sparks, as a romantic comedy, soon takes on an eerie bent, as the aforementioned male writer begins to exert his control over a flesh-and-blood woman, who he tries to bend to his every will. This meta assertion of dominion can be found in Daniela Forever as well, as Nicolás’ takes exception to his dreamt figment of Daniela spending time with her ex-girlfriend Teresa (Aura Garrido), and generally having a life outside him—but there’s a central flaw in its construction.

Daniela, though she once existed, is not real, and the film only gestures toward what (if any) relationship this experimental treatment has to reality. In effect, Nicolás’ insecurities and even his most despicable actions are, at worst, aspects of his subconscious, and the film never presents the reality of his relationship with Daniela, when she was alive, for the sake of comparison. Daniela Forever therefore becomes a venue to deconstruct male authorship over female characters, and the toxic jealousies driving men in relationships, without ever confronting the more tangible reality of its protagonist’s mourning, and any underlying complexities to his outlook on a real woman he knew and lived with. The images on screen say “this is the reductive way in which some men look at women,” but this broad approach circumvents any specificity; how does, or did Nicolás, specifically, see Daniela when she was alive?

Vigalondo’s films have long simplified emotional concepts and filtered them through a genre lens in remarkable ways—like his 2015 feminist kaiju saga Colossal, which projected masculine insecurity onto Godzilla-like monsters—but Daniela Forever has too many things going on at once, allowing few of them to stand out. Golding, for his part, plays this type of character to a tee, a charming expat harboring an unpleasantness around his relationship to women. There’s a sincerity to his melancholy, but a dismissiveness in equal measure when it comes to considering Daniela’s feelings—the fictitious Daniela, that is. The problem lies in the fact that the film never fully establishes a relationship between this dream dynamic and the characters’ dynamic in the real world. So, when the lines of fiction and reality begin to blur, the grief aspect of the movie ceases to matter, rendering the emotional consequences practically null.

There is perhaps a better and—ironically—more lucid version of Daniela Forever hidden within its many cuts between dreams and waking. The film’s dedications in its closing credits (including to one of its actors, who recently died) speak to a genuine attempt to confront loss through a sci-fi lens. However, the otherwise accomplished Vigalondo comes up uncharacteristically short, with a tale spread too thin between the charged concepts of deconstructing fictional tropes and analyzing the effect of death on the human psyche. In the end, the movie does neither.