After the sudden death of his Italian club-denizen girlfriend, Daniela (Beatrice Granno), American DJ Nicolas (Henry Golding) comes apart. When he joins an experimental sleep study, he discovers he can rebuild or at least recreate a convincing facsimile of his previous life through lucid dreams, which allows him to avoid dealing with anything real.
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And that’s the problem. What Nicolas creates is only a surface level approximation. While initially it seems ideal—he’s able to see and touch and interact with Daniela—it’s all based on his memories, his experiences, and falls prey to all the gaps that entails. Daniela begins as an avatar, an empty vessel. He was never privy to her innermost thoughts and notions, so she’s never a fully rounded person, never more than an image of who he thought she was. And maybe he didn’t know her as well as he believed.
Then, within these lucid dreams, Daniela begins to grow and change. It’s an intriguing way for a script to develop a character. We never meet the real Daniela, Daniela as she was in life, we only see Nicolas’ conception of her and then this evolution. In the beginning, it feels very much like he’s training an AI, feeding information into a program that spits back an incomplete version of this person he knew. At one point, when presented with an artifact from her life, she asks him, “Do I care about this?” He informs her that, “You love it.” But did she? It looks like her, but it isn’t quite her, it doesn’t feel quite right. That sensation only grows as dream Daniela begins to fill in the blanks herself and develop into a fully rounded, albeit different version of who she was.
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This shift in our perception of her also shifts our perception of him. On the surface, Nicolas looks like this sweet, heartbroken guy wallowing in pain and idyllic memories of a flawless relationship. But what ultimately comes out is that he’s much more manipulative, insecure, jealous, and caustic than he appears. It’s a nice subversion of the pure nice-guy persona that Golding so often plays and the lovelorn sad-sack we’ve seen so many times in similarly themed films.
Vigalondo uses an aesthetic trick to differentiate between real life and the dream world. Nicolas’ waking life is presented in a tight, constricted frame. Gray and grainy, with flat, muted colors, it looks like it was shot on an old camcorder, one of those mammoth shoulder-mounted jobs from yesteryear. Dreams, on the other hand, are vivid, full of life and color, and shown full spectrum, as if they’re the more real of the two. This discrepancy also offers a unique way to go about world-building. For example, in his dreams, Nicolas can’t go down a street he’s never been down, so to complete his dream world with Daniela, he further explores and expands his external and internal realities.
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Daniela Forever is full of Vigalondo’s unique charms and sensibilities; he has a peculiar eye and that comes through. One delightful bit involves Daniela deciding she wants to be a shark with a gun while Nicolas manifests a Dracula with a chainsaw. Golding and Granno have a sweet chemistry. And it’s an interesting exploration of the nature of dreams and memory, the ways we see ourselves and others, and the idea that maybe it’s impossible to ever truly, wholly comprehend someone. But for all the film offers, it’s always a bit cold and aloof, like it keeps us at arm’s length, never quite connecting on deeper, more emotional levels. [Grade: B-]
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