A renter comes to accept that she shares her unit with a miniature black hole.
Tag Archives: 2024
CAPSULE: DANIELA FOREVER (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Nacho Vigalondo
FEATURING: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Nathalie Poza
PLOT: A man enters a secret trial for a drug that exponentially enhances lucid dreaming, but instead of following instructions, he brings his dead girlfriend to life in a dream world.
COMMENTS: Modern mystic Alan Watts once delivered a lecture (which became the basis for an indie movie reviewed here) that suggested that if we could achieve our every desire through lucid dreaming, we would eventually become bored with omnipotence and return to the exact waking reality we once fled. Daniela Forever‘s Nicolás is determined to test that theory. After his girlfriend dies in a freak accident (for which he irrationally blames himself), all he wants is to live a simple life with Daniela alive and back in his apartment, forever. A lucid dreaming clinical trial gives him the opportunity to create that fantasy in a simulated world where he has almost total control over every aspect of reality, from the position of the sun to Daniela’s every mood, along with the ability to pause, rewind, and restart the flow of time. As he gains more and more facility with the process, he finds himself able to expand his dream-world from his cozy apartment to encompass most of Madrid (although he can’t create areas he’s never seen in waking reality, which show up in the dream as undulating grey walls). But he becomes surprised when Daniela suddenly appears to be developing free will and having thoughts of her own he didn’t place there. Meanwhile, the story moves forward in the waking world, where Nicolás deceives his clinical overseers about his real intentions, creating fake reports about assignments he is ignoring. How long can he keep it up?
While the dream-world is vibrant widescreen, Nicolás‘ everyday reality is shot in dingy, washed-out color (filmed in Betamax, to wit), and presented in a cramped, perfectly square aspect ratio. Distinguishing dreams from reality is thus not an issue for the viewer, at least not in the movie’s first two acts. While the film features some visual experimentation—mostly glitches like improper lighting schemes and stuttering, which are explicitly pointed out by the characters—there is no dream logic to the story. It all plays out instead with speculative realism. There is an interesting motif that shows up in Daniela’s artwork, however, where shadows skew in impossible directions: perhaps a nod to Last Year at Marienbad, that dreamlike smudge of a story in which a man and a woman’s memories of their relationship never match up. That suggestion may point towards the film’s weirder aspirations, and in the third act, Nicolás finds a way to boostrap the dream world, leading to unpredictable results, dreams bleeding into reality, and flirtation with meatier psychological thriller territory.
The creative scenario is rife with intellectual implications. Ethical questions proliferate in both the real and dream worlds. Nicolás‘ godlike abilities create one set of conflicts; his romantic fixation creates another. His dreambuilding also mirrors the evolution of a relationship, beginning in an infatuation stage where the lovers seem mystically simpatico in their mutual desires, but gradually revealing a frustrating separateness that undermines the utopian illusion.
What’s good about Daniela Forever is its thought-provoking premise. The execution, however, does not always match the conception. The pacing is a bit off; although it gets to the point quickly, it may spend a bit too much time locked in that apartment in repetitive scenarios of self-indulgent domestic bliss. I was surprised to read critical praise for Henry Golding’s performance; I found him almost unbearably bland and difficult to sympathize with—or to figure out what Daniela saw in him in the first place. The ending also feels emotionally forced, for reasons that unfortunately can’t be disclosed without spoilers. Of course, none of these small complaints kill Daniela Forever; they just hold it back from rising to the heights of such forebears as Open Your Eyes and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which would be lofty company indeed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: BUTTERFLY KISSES (2024)
The short that asks the question: would you marry me if I became an evil butterfly?
CAPSULE: HARVEST (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Athina Rachel Tsangari
FEATURING: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Arinzé Kene, Frank Dillane, Rosy McEwen, Thalissa Teixeira, Neil Leiper
PLOT: Life in a Scottish farming village changes dramatically with the arrival of a new lord.
COMMENTS: In a nameless village in an uncertain time—sometime after the arrival of tobacco, but before the Industrial Revolution has reached rural Scotland—Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) eats bark and sticks his tongue into a knothole on an oak tree. You can’t get much more at one with the land than that.
The village Walter lives in has no name. That changes when a chart-maker comes to map out the area. The natives see cartography as a threat; naming things is the first step to owning them, and the village operates (although somewhat hypocritically) on the principle of communal ownership of the land. Not that these people are noble savages, exactly; they’re as cruel, superstitious, and racist as they are poor. Walter wasn’t born there, but married a native and is now a widower; he is a close confidant of the beneficent landowner Master Kent, also not native born. He is a semi-outsider, caught between worlds, not fully accepted by the villagers but lacking another place to call home. His liminal status turns him into an observer. He befriends the cartographer, but also scolds him for “flattening” the land by mapping it. Walter is also spineless, sensing danger but as unable to stop progress from marching into the literal one-horse town as is the weak-willed Mater Kent. A fire in the Master’s stable foretells evil to come. Then, three outsiders are pilloried—for the crime of being outsiders. Walter is the only one who sympathizes with the trio, but he is unable to muster the strength or courage to challenge any decision of the powers that be.
Harvest is beautifully shot (sometimes reminiscent of the “harvest” subgenre of European painting) and impressively scored (one peasant threshing song is synced to the rhythm of swinging scythes). But the storytelling is confusing, the dialogue can be stiff, and the feckless protagonists supply little dramatic momentum as the story limps to its inevitable conclusion. The “hallucinatory” element suggested in Harvest‘s promotional materials is vastly oversold; in truth, the strangeness (mostly coming from the slightly alien behavior of the village’s peasants) never rises beyond the occasionally odd. Nor is the movie, as a few have claimed, folk horror (there’s plenty of folk, including some authentic-sounding bagpipe tunes, but no real horror). With this project, director/co-scripter Tsangari distances herself from her association with the “Greek Weird Wave,” delivering an on-the-nose exploration of the ruthlessness with which capitalism replaced agrarian societies. Weirdophiles may safely skip this one; arthouse fans with a taste for historical, class-conscious narratives might find it worthwhile.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CHANNEL 366: UZUMAKI (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi Nagahama, Yûji Moriyama
FEATURING: Uki Satake, Shin’ichirô Miki; Abby Trott, Robbie Daymond (English dub)
PLOT: Residents of a small Japanese town are increasingly haunted by spirals.
COMMENTS: Most horror story monsters are inspired by symbols of death, disease, and predation, not unthreatening geometric shapes like the humble spiral. Leave it to eerie manga star Junjo Ito to choose the spiral as his avatar of evil. Uzumaki (which had previously been adapted as a live-action feature) plumbs every possible devious iteration of the humble coil; it shows up in the story as whirlwinds, whirlpools, DNA, snail’s shells, hair curls, staircases, mosquito swarms, corkscrews, springs, and the twisted, intertwined bodies of snakes (and people). Watch with disquietude as everyday objects in the town gradually get twisted as the story spirals towards its grim conclusion.
The bizarre antagonist is not the only weird element here. The originally-serialized story lurches forward as a series of vignettes, with a threatening new spiral form dominating each mini-arc. In between episodes, normality resets. After the first girl’s head dissolves into a spiral, we would think the two high school protagonists would flee town; instead, the incident is never mentioned again. After the first kid turns into a human-snail hybrid, you would think the town would panic; instead, they accept it as the new normal, building a pen for the newly-minted escargot boy to live in. The commonsense idea of fleeing the town doesn’t even arise until the second episode, when one pair of aspiring refugees are frustrated in their attempt—but our main characters never even attempt to leave until the final episode, when the narrative finally proffers an explanation for their inability to escape. A particularly intense, vampire-adjacent incident dominates the third episode, but again, after a jarring edit, this horror is entirely forgotten. The characters’ incapacity—and their resigned unwillingness—to escape their situation lends the story an especially irrational, nightmarish quality. In fact, Uzuamki‘s entire structure, oscillating between grotesque visions and uneasy pseudo-normality, suggests madness; perhaps our main characters are actually trapped inside their own obsessive delusions, imagining spirals everywhere.
The art style is done entirely in black and white and imitates the intricate linework of Ito’s original drawings, sometimes recreating particularly bizarre panels. When animated, the absurdity of some of Ito’s visions—a dramatically curling tongue, a pair of eyeballs rotating independently—can be as weirdly comic as they are frightening. But the artwork is almost always strange and affecting, no matter the overall emotional effect. Much was made in anime fandom of the fact that the animation quality declines as the series progresses (probably due to budgetary mismanagement). By the final episode, the directors and producers aren’t even credited. I think that this complaint is mostly overstated, at least for the average viewer. I noted the decline in the cartoon’s fluidity and detail with each new episode, but it wasn’t as drastic as I feared; if I hadn’t been forewarned, I’m not sure how much I would have noticed. Perhaps I benefited from having my expectations lowered; perhaps you will, too. Although Uzumaki hobbles a bit on the way to the finish line, it eventually crosses it. It’s not the wall-to-wall masterpiece the first episode promised, but I wouldn’t say it exactly circles the drain, either.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
