It’s been almost a decade since Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has graced cinemas with his bittersweet interpretation of whimsy, having previously enjoyed minor successes with the Gilliam-esque Timecrimes in 2007 and slacker-kaiju mash-up Colossal in 2016. Daniela Forever finds him treading similar ground tonally, following the grieving Nicolas (a game but miscast Henry Golding) as he struggles to cope with the death of his girlfriend Daniela (Beatrice Grannò). In a bid to cure his depression, he turns to a clinical trial which focuses on lucid dreaming, allowing him to continue his relationship with Daniela in a dream world of his own creation. 

While its opening gambit of a shadowy science experiment and a drug dosage gone wrong might recall The Substance, there are more shades of Michel Gondry here than Coralie Fargeat. The debt it owes to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is splashed liberally throughout each scene, from its homespun effects to a deeply flawed male protagonist. What sets it apart from Gondry’s hipper-than-thou sensibility is the love it harbours for its setting of Madrid, the vivid colour palette of the city adding a laidback cool to even Daniela Forever’s most maudlin moments. 

As ever, Vigalondo proves himself to be a formal dab hand, transitioning between different aspect ratios and grades to create a distinct divide between the dream world and real life in a technique as eye-catching as A Matter Of Life And Death, while his lo-fi depiction of hallucinatory consciousness has a tactility missing from most modern cinema. Despite these flourishes, the world-building isn’t expansive enough to bear the weight of this ambitious blend of sci-fi and romcom, but its sly subversion of the meet-cute and its knotted examination of loss make for a worthwhile, charmingly earnest experience. 

Daniela Forever is screened at GFT on Tuesday 4 March as part of Glasgow Film Festival.