The worst nightmare of the girl of your dreams

In Nacho Vigalondo's extraterrestrial cinema, irrevocably alien to the majority trends of Spanish cinema, the rewriting of cinematographic genres is linked to an intimate investigation into human fragilities that seems to have a lot of personal exorcism. Daniela forever transits, in a similar way to how it did Forget about me (Michel Gondry, 2004), between science fiction and indie drama, to end up composing an accurate portrait of a melancholic and obsessive masculinity that includes a critical look at the traditional idea of romantic love, a theme already pointed out in Extraterrestrial (2011) and in the fantastic Colossal (2016). Nicolas loses Daniela, the love of his life, in a traffic accident, but an experimental drug allows him to dream of her every night while controlling and shaping her according to memories biased by a desire that, little by little, is revealed to be suffocating. It is impossible not to applaud the risks that Vigalondo takes in each of his very personal films, even though his unusual premises end up, as in this case, leading to a confusing narrative, with too many plot twists and multiple endings. In the same way, it is easy to vindicate a Spanish filmmaker who still thinks of cinema as a space for visual experimentation, an issue present in the beautiful idea of the change of formats between reality and dream and in images with an unusual dreamlike force (the characters illuminated at night with daylight) that seem to draw on science fiction cinema. lo-fi (Shane Carruth, Velasco Broca) more Martian.