TIFF 2024 Review: Daniela Forever – “a high concept film that doesn’t quite stick its landing.”

Courtesy of TIFF

When Nick (Henry Golding) suddenly loses this girlfriend, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) in a tragic accident he is overrun with grief.  And guilt.  If only he had picked up the phone when she called, maybe things would be different.  He disappears from his friends, can’t find it within himself to work, his apartment is a mess of take out containers.  Then, his friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) tells him about her own depression when her marriage failed.  She could barely get through it, if not for the help of a new experimental treatment.

Developed by a pharmaceutical company and currently going through top secret trials (with a trio of strange scientists), this drug allows the patient to ‘lucid dream.’  It’s a type of dream where you know you’re dreaming, but also where you can control what you see.  But, even though Nick signed onto their strict guidelines, he quickly discovers that he can live in a world where Daniela is back from the dead.  Where he can generate her once he sleeps.  Sure, she’s not quite the same, but his heart feels full again.

Director Nacho Vigalondo was last at TIFF with 2016’s Colossal, a movie that as well asked us to surrender to his brand of fantastical science fiction.  Certainly Daniela Forever is no different, as Nick wanders around the dreamworld he has created he eventually learns he can manufacture anything from memory, or play his own soundtrack.  If he wants he can conjure an entire street, or storefront.  He can create the haunted house where he worked in his youth, and if he wants to be Dracula with a chainsaw, and Daniela wants to be a shark with a gun, he can also make all that happen (and yes, watching Daniela wander around in a shark costume brandishing a pistol is all types of strange fun.)

Vigalonda plays around with picture quality and aspect ratio to keep our understanding of the ‘real world’ and ‘dreamworlds’ different.  Reality is boxy, grainy, like an old 80’s TV show, but when Nick enters his lucid dreams, his world expands, the colours pop, the static disappears.  Everything is crystal clear and focussed.  Vigalonda has a distinct vision when it comes to his directing, but its the writing where things somewhat falter, and by the end of the film the worlds we knew as distinct blur in a way that doesn’t quite make sense.  It concludes in a way that is even more a leap of faith, that shouldn’t happen with the world-building Vigalonda has done.

Holding everything together is Henry Golding, who is distinctly charming and showing his finest role to date, even in a terribly flawed character.  Yes, eventually you will end up disliking Nick, who starts to order the dream Daniela to his every whim and manipulate the woman he loved to his vision of ‘perfection’.  It’s a lot of gaslighting and just devious.  Even the Daniela of his mind pushes back, but it’s hard to do so when your creator can also make you forget.  Yet Golding persists in holding your interest, even when you can’t root for his character.

Daniela Forever is an interesting way to portray grief, and how we can cope with loss.  I have no doubt that if this treatment existed, people would love this as an option.  To have our loved ones who passed be able to return to us, in any capacity is a gift.  But to control them and force them to our will is not honouring their memory at all.  This is a high concept film that doesn’t quite stick its landing, whose premise outstays its welcome, whose protagonist becomes too calculated, continuing to escalate his own needs when he just needs to heal.  If Daniela Forever is to show us anything, it’s how to let go.  And of this movie, I can do that.  Minus the shark costume, that is staying with me.  Forever.

Daniela Forever had its world premiere September 6th at the Toronto International Film Festival.  For more information head to tiff.net