What we don’t yet get from Paulo is the human touch, at least not at the film’s heart, where it matters most. Though obviously not credible in terms of life, it does work in terms of its own machinery (Paolo, not for the first time, includes close-ups of a precision-engineered timepiece, aware that his scripts are millimetrically designed).
MIRAGE MOVIE MOVIE
This is the kind of movie that will have audiences putting together the dramatic jigsaw as they leave the cinema, but after they’ve done so they’ll find that most of it locks neatly into place.
The result is either going to be a god-awful mess or an intriguing, high-speed ride, and Paolo (along with co-scripter Lara Sendim) mostly provides the latter.
The film can’t be pinned down to merely one or two genres: Not only sci-fi, but also noir, family drama and historical drama are present, correct and under control. Buffs will enjoy picking up the multiple film refs even as they seize upon the many plot details that will lead them to a final twist that some will find too obvious, which is Paulo’s problem here, as it is in his earlier work.īut what Mirage lacks in canniness it makes up for in ambition. Mirage is not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve, most notably Gregory Hoblit’s 2000 Dennis Quaid starrer Frequency and (of course) Back to the Future. (The viewer may be surprised that Vera has energy to do all this, and indeed the time, because she also learns that the whole thing has be sorted out within 72 hours, before the storm ends.) Along the way she will encounter a good-looking but bland cop, Inspector Leyra (Chino Darin), and a whole bunch of other characters, among them a police inspector played by Ana Wagener, from The Invisible Guest, and Belen Rueda (a Paulo regular and perhaps the queen of Spanish cinema’s suffering mothers, known for her role in The Orphanage) as the writer who explains to Vera how all this weird time and space stuff might be happening. Vera will spend most of the remainder of the film stumbling desperately around in this alternative reality, trying to make sense of it all, to recover Gloria, and also to solve the mystery of how the killer Prieto is free. And, most important, little Gloria has disappeared altogether from Vera’s life, because apparently she’s never been born. Now living in an unrecognizable reality, she is indeed the neurosurgeon she never became, David is married to Ursula (Aina Clotet), and Prieto the murderer is happily married to Clara (Nora Navas). However, on waking in the hospital where she works, Vera finds that her apparently perfect existence has taken a different, Borges-like path. Vera will now get the chance to change history and save Nico’s life.
MIRAGE MOVIE TV
One night, during a replica of the 1989 storm, Vera finds a TV in a closet and sees Nico is on it, talking to her from 25 years earlier. Twenty-five years later, nurse Vera (Adriana Ugarte, most familiar to international audiences from Almodovar’s Julieta), having abandoned a potentially brilliant career as a neurosurgeon, has recently moved into Nico’s house along with husband David (Alvaro Morte) and baby daughter Gloria (Luna Fulgencio). Nico runs, but in doing so is hit by a truck and apparently killed. On doing so, he finds the dead body of the wife of his neighbor Prieto (Javier Gutierrez), who’s standing over the body with a knife. Nico (Julio Bohigas), a kid who enjoys videoing himself playing songs on the guitar, hears noises from next door and investigates. It is 1989, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, during a storm.
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