BEFORE WE FORGET - Mark Reviews Movies

Before We Forget, The Film Collaborative

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 10, 2025

There's little room for interpretation in writer/co-director Juan Pablo Di Pace's Before We Forget, in which the filmmaker also stars as a filmmaker working on a movie about his first real but unrequited love. For something that clearly must be so personal, this movie doesn't quite achieve the emotional resonance Di Pace and co-director Andrés Pepe Estrada are working toward accomplishing.

The structure of the story might be a significant reason for that. It's told by way of flashbacks to the college days of a young Matias (Santiago Madrussan), who has received a full scholarship to an elite international arts school in Italy. The young man, originally from Argentina, has a passion for photography, and a first-day, impromptu dance performance at an introductory talent show catches the eye of a young Alexander (Oscar Morgan), a child of wealth from a Swedish family.

The two men couldn't be more unalike. Matias is quiet, shy, and serious. Alexander is brash, speaks loudly, and makes a joke of pretty much everything. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that Matias is smitten with his classmate, but despite his extroverted nature, Alexander is basically unreadable when it comes to how he might feel about his friend, if he even does in any way beyond that close friendship.

Presumably, that's the question an older Matias, played by Di Pace, wants to interrogate with what's presumably his first feature film. It's difficult to tell, because the movie we're watching is not the movie Matias has shot and is currently struggling to edit, after a single scene of the production hints that the director didn't want to stop filming in the first place.

Nothing, apparently, went to his liking, right down to a final day of shooting that goes into overtime and has Matias arguing for one more take after he promised the previous take would be the last one. His longtime friend Paolo (played as an adult by Junan Cruz Márquez de la Serna and a young man by Tomás Kirzner) is the movie's producer, and he finally convinces the director to stop, because there's a festival deadline to meet.

The rest of the story from the past is either an objective set of flashbacks or a collection of Matias' memories. We watch as Matias and Alexander spend a lot of time together, talking and joking about anything, and also as the former stares longingly at latter when his friend isn't paying attention.

These scenes make room for a perspective outside of Matias', such as some moments back home with the young man's parents Roma (Araceli González, as well as Marta Betriz Maineri as an older woman) and Silvio (Fabián Mazzei), who watch home movies of their son at school and each suspect that Matias has deeper feelings for his Swedish friend. It even has space for Alexander's own family, who invite Matias to their nearby summer home after Alexander is expelled from school. The young man's own mother (played by Sarah Parish) catches Matias taking photos of her son while he's asleep, but regardless, she seems hopeful that Matias and her daughter Kathrine (Julia Bender) might become a couple.

The point of mentioning these diversions from Matias' perspective is to highlight that none of those departures reveals a thing about Alexander, beyond what our protagonist sees and experiences. He's a mystery, not because the story is framed and told in such a way that he must be, but because he must be in order for the story to have that mystery at its center. A single scene of Alexander mentioning what he might notice about Matias' attention or acknowledging his feelings—or the lack thereof—would ruin the movie's illusion. Like Matias, we're left to seek out clues, such as how Alexander says goodbye to his friend on camera after his expulsion, and read between the lines, such as how the friend reacts when he realizes his sister has a crush on Matias.

It's a fine idea, to be sure, but again, the issue is that storytelling itself doesn't back up the conceit. What we get, instead, is a compelling tale about longing, worry of rejection, and fear of being seen as "different" in those flashbacks, which really do work on their own as a bittersweet story of one-sided love or mutual affection that cannot be acknowledged for whatever reason. The mystery of Alexander's feelings exists well enough, even with the way the screenplay cheats with the narrative's perspective, because the story remains one about the pangs of a young man who feels as if he cannot express himself and his emotions freely. If it's that way for our protagonist, it could very well be the same for Alexander.

We accept all of that in the flashbacks, but then, there are the scenes in the present day, which don't reveal much of anything, apart from Matias' uncertainty about his old friend and the true nature of that friendship. It's redundant, really, and means that Before We Forget circles around the same basic idea in two different timelines, in which one feels as if it's happening in the moment and the other doesn't even come across as an examination of the early one. There's a better story somewhere in here—one that either uses the making of the movie to investigate its characters or does away with the meta-level structure entirely.

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