Mark Reviews Movies: FEVER DREAM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2021

As a woman lies on a forest floor, convinced that there are worms of things like worms in her body, the voice of a young boy tells her to pay attention to the details. They're important for her to understand, not so much what is happening, but what has happened. Writer/director Claudia Llosa's Fever Dream only wants to play a game with those details.

The story here comes from Samanta Schweblin's novel of the same name (In the original Spanish, the title of both book and movie is Distancia de rescate, or "rescue distance"). As the title suggests, the tale is strange, with elements of alleged or very real fantasy and underlying horror, and told in a manner that cares little for straightforward chronology. As far as we can tell, Amanda (María Valverde) is sick, dying, or dead, and the answers to her condition, as well as to whatever the boy with the disembodied voice wants to know, are somewhere in her recent past.

This is an intriguing premise, for sure. Too much of Llosa's approach and the central narrative, though, end up working against it and the actual point that's being made here.

To describe the actual story, of course, is a bit difficult, since Amanda's memories shift around in time and the presence of David (Emilio Vodanovich and, as a younger child, Marcelo Michinaux), the young boy whose voice is guiding her, means that she's privy to information she otherwise wouldn't possess. Basically, Amanda and her daughter Nina (Guillermina Sorribes Liotta) moved from the city to the countryside in Argentina. While they wait for Amanda's yet-to-arrive husband, the newcomer strikes up a fast friendship with Carola (Dolores Fonzi).

She's David's mother and the wife of Omar (Germán Palacios), a man who once bred horses but who has come under serious financial strain after a wealthy man's stallion died under his care. The story of the horse, which becomes ill under not-too-mysterious circumstances after drinking dirty water, is the first hint of what's really happening in this area, but like so many of the puzzles in this tale, Llosa delays the revelation in favor of creating an increasingly enigmatic and unsettling air.

The atmosphere here is certainly effective for a while. Amanda's current helplessness and the near-complete absence of any explanation for her condition give the material a sense of desperation. They also provide the narrative with an initial sense of momentum, as we try to follow David's advice of searching for details that might explain, not only what happened to Amanda, but also what the larger story actually concerns.

Most of Amanda's memories involve the last day she can recall, when Carola came to visit and explained why she believes David isn't really her son but a monster. It has to do with a green house down the river, where a woman with old-fashioned ways and beliefs helps those in most hopeless need of healing. Whether or not those means are real and whatever consequences such possible magic might have on these characters exist as another hanging thread in this story. The mere existence of such questions ultimately distracts from and downplays the very real issue that's happening to these characters and everyone else in the region.

That, of course, cannot be revealed here, since Llosa decides that it's important enough to treat as the story's biggest revelation but not significant enough to confront it in any meaningful way within the narrative. Clues arrive, giving a sense of the devastation caused by this real-world problem, but they do only feel like clues leading us to the big reveal, which is easy enough to figure out before the filmmaker actually deals with it directly (Some of the later hints, especially in how Llosa lingers on or abruptly cuts away to them, might as well be disclosures).

Instead, Llosa coasts on the mysterious and discomforting aura of a sick/dying/dead woman's most desperate thoughts, the uncertainty of David's nature and intentions in the flashbacks and in his guidance, and some wise insights about Amanda's relationship with her daughter (Indirectly, this also provides a sense of what David might feel that he's missing in the strained bond with Carola, but the boy is more a plot device than an actual character for it to really mean anything). She imagines an invisible thread between her and Nina, always intrinsically knowing the distance in case Amanda needs to rescue her daughter. It's a potent metaphor, especially as the dreaming or dying Amanda starts to feel that thread become stretched to the point of separation.

The basic mood here is effective, perhaps because Llosa sacrifices so much in terms of narrative and message in order to make it the core focus. That's not the only purpose of Fever Dream, and as those elements become more vital, the movie reveals itself as an intentionally but frustratingly perplexing experience.

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