Tom Hardy wouldn't survive five minutes in this dreamscape.
Henry Golding just went full Black Mirror-meets-Eternal Sunshine—and genre diehards are losing it.
In the official trailer for Daniela Forever, Golding plays Nicolás, a grief-stricken man who volunteers for a radical sleep therapy trial. The goal? Rebuild your dead lover in your dreams. The catch? Uh… try not to get lost forever. From the mind behind Timecrimes and Colossal, Nacho Vigalondo's latest sci-fi fever dream premiered at TIFF's Midnight Madness and has been spinning heads ever since.
It's like Inception took shrooms, binge-watched Netflix's ‘Maniac', and cried into a box of tissues.
This Isn't Just Another Sad Boy Sci-Fi—Here's Why It's Different
First things first: this isn't the Nicholas Sparks version of lucid dreaming.
The trailer wastes no time. It hurls you into an uncanny, dreamlike space where love, memory, and obsession swirl together like a trippy smoothie of heartbreak. Nicolás is offered a chance to be reunited with Daniela (Beatrice Grannò), not in some corny “afterlife,” but via lucid dreams engineered in a sleep lab.
Yes, you read that right—corporate-approved romantic recursion.
Here's the kicker: what starts as emotional healing slides quickly into something darker. Nicolás starts skipping reality to spend more time in the dream. And suddenly, you're wondering:
Is this therapy or self-erasure?
With scenes that echo the glitchy intimacy of The Science of Sleep and the existential punch of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Daniela Forever shatters genre tropes. It's not about moving on. It's about the fantasy of never having to—and the horror when that fantasy cracks.
Lucid Dreams, Real Wounds: Why ‘Daniela Forever' Hits Hard
Let's be real: sci-fi romance is a graveyard of good intentions. For every Her, we get a dozen techno-love flops. But Vigalondo isn't new to this game.
He's the guy who made time travel scary in Timecrimes, made aliens emotional in Extraterrestrial, and gave us a kaiju breakup metaphor in Colossal. Now, he's putting grief under a microscope—and asking whether closure is even ethical in an age of digital illusions.
Think of it as therapy's final boss battle—with your memories as the enemy.
The trailer teases imagery that's downright hallucinatory. Fragmented mirrors. Dream loops. Time slippages. But what makes it squirm under your skin is how eerily plausible it feels. Like, give Silicon Valley five years and you know someone's going to launch “DreamClone AI.”
Critical Whiplash Incoming: Early Reviews Are… Confused
Let's address the black hole in the room—yes, the early reviews are mixed.
Some praise it as “visually poetic and emotionally searing.” Others claim the narrative “gets lost in its own reflection.” Which, let's be honest, is exactly the kind of feedback a movie like this should get. You don't make Daniela Forever for mass appeal. You make it for those of us who still cry rewatching the Montauk scene in Eternal Sunshine.
Either way, Golding delivers a career-best performance, balancing haunted sincerity with moments of dreamlike disassociation. Beatrice Grannò is equally magnetic, playing Daniela as both memory and mirage.
The Real-World Fear Behind the Film
Let's talk about the elephant in the lab: the rise of grief tech.
Companies are already experimenting with AI simulations of deceased loved ones. South Korea made headlines when a mother “reunited” with her dead daughter via VR. Daniela Forever takes that premise and injects it with genre steroids.
It asks the question nobody wants to answer:
If we could revive the dead in dreams… would we ever want to wake up?
The film becomes a parable for our age of emotional outsourcing—when even closure can be productized. And that's what makes it terrifying.
So… Genius or Garbage? Let's Argue
Look, this is either going to be a cult classic or a cautionary tale for screenwriters. Either way, it's a conversation-starter disguised as sci-fi.
Will you vibe with it? Depends. If you liked Paprika, Annihilation, or Maniac, you're probably already Googling local screenings. If you wanted a feel-good ghost story, uh, maybe sit this one out.
But one thing's for sure—Vigalondo's not letting you leave the theater without thinking.
Would you enter a dream to see your ex one last time?
