DANIELA FOREVER - Mark Reviews Movies

Daniela Forever, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 10, 2025

There are no rules or limits to grief, and that might be part of the reason the inventive but ultimately shallow Daniela Forever falters. This is a story about grief, to be sure, but it's also and mostly a gimmicky tale about an entire world created within dreams. Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo seems more interested in the possibilities and uncertainty of this world than in the emotional reality of the character who invents it.

That man is Nicolas (Henry Golding), a DJ who currently lives in Madrid after starting a romantic relationship with Daniela (Beatrice Grannò). After a dream-like introduction to the couple in which we see them meet and grow closer with some narration accompanying the montage, we reach the end of their love story.

Daniela was killed after being hit by a car while waiting for a bus, leaving Nicolas alone in the apartment they shared, in a city where he had never planned to live, and with the guilt and regret that comes from losing a loved one. Vigalondo and cinematographer Jon D. Domínguez record the man's life after Daniela's death within the tiny, boxy, and confined frame of an old video camera, as if he's trapped with everything closing in around him and seeming just a bit out of focus.

That aesthetic becomes more important than just the feeling associated with it, because Nicolas soon learns from his and Daniela's mutual friend Victoria (Nathalie Poza) about an experimental treatment to help with painful memories. It uses medication and a sort of meditation to encourage lucid dreaming in the procedure's participants. The basics of how it works, which Victoria assures Nicolas of the success of the process, are unimportant, because Nicolas unintentionally fails one of the few required steps on his first go. He should be thinking of a particular scenario, devised by the institute handling the treatment, but after accidentally spilling some water on the instructions, Nicolas looks at a picture of Daniela just before the medication puts him to sleep.

The resulting conceit of Vigalondo's screenplay is admittedly potent and achingly bittersweet. Nicolas wants to forget Daniela or at least the pain that has resulted from her tragic death (Again, whatever this procedure is supposed to do is an irrelevant mystery). Instead, he dreams that Daniela is still alive, sitting in a chair in front of him as the two are surrounded by gray, melting void. He can see her, speak to her, and even touch her again as if she's alive.

The feeling that comes from that experience, of course, is too tempting for Nicolas, who continues the treatment but lies to the scientists about the nature of his dreams. As the month-long process continues, Nicolas can essentially spend his sleeping hours going on with his life with Daniela in a perfect replication of anywhere and everywhere they have ever been. It feels genuinely real to him, too, and the filmmakers widen the frame in the dream sequences to give it the scope and clarity of something that, to Nicolas, is more appealing than real life.

Again, the idea of this story is more than sound and even quite moving at times. There are rules and exceptions to the world of Nicolas' dream, of course, such as the fact that the dreamscape itself only exists in terms of what he has seen in the real world. Any gaps in his knowledge or memory result in those gray, viscous surfaces, such as when Daniela wants to wander down an alley that has passed by Nicolas' attention or how the inside of an unentered shop looking out is just a wall of blankness. It is a neat visual, to be sure, but also hints at where this story starts heading, which is more about the kind of person Nicolas is than what he's experiencing in the middle of loss.

There's a definitive turn in the story, and it arrives when our protagonist realizes that dream Daniela might not exist simply as a construction of his mind. She can think for herself, for example, and starts creating new art that the real Daniela never made while she was alive. She even starts spending time with ex-girlfriend Teresa (Aura Garrido) while Nicolas is awake or as soon as this dream world returns to existence when he falls asleep.

This development raises tantalizing questions about both the mechanics of the dream world and, more importantly, the nature and agency of a character who, to us, only exists as a memory, an anecdote among the couple's friends, and a figment of Nicholas' sleeping brain. It might, in fact, give Nicolas and us more reason to grieve Daniela's loss, because a person strong enough to break the restrictions of existing in a dream must have been quite a person in reality.

What actually happens in this story, though, begins to bend and break the barriers between dreams and reality in ways that only make the already-shaky ground of the premise even shakier. The turn also means that Daniela Forever becomes less about Daniela, less about grief, and less about the striking visuals, as Nicholas' apparent need to control everything and everyone around him takes over. It is an intriguing idea but does come across as a hard turn away from the poignancy the movie initially achieves.

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