The Big Picture

Víctor Erice’s
Close Your Eyes
is a magnificent film that explores loss, memory, and cinema itself.
The director’s first feature in 30 years unfolds as a patient mystery that builds to melancholic, deeply personal reflections.

Close Your Eyes
undertakes an unexpected shift, creating quitely stunning scenes that grapple with the magic of cinema and the more mundane slivers of life.

Some of the best and most beautiful gifts of cinema are those that are also the form’s rarest. They come along only every so often from filmmakers who may not be the most prolific, but are just as essential to see work their magic at every chance you can. From the moment you first experience one of their films, you feel like you’ve taken in something as magnificent as it is monumental. They may be fleeting in the grand history of film, but that only makes them all the more precious. Víctor Erice is one such visionary whose works hold this quiet, incandescent power in every single frame. Ever since he made his first feature, 1973’s transcendent The Spirit of the Beehive, he has become one of the most fascinating and formidable filmmakers to ever live. However, he’s only made two other features, the equally essential films El Sur and Dream of Light, while mainly focusing on shorts. That is, until now.

His fourth feature and first in 30 years, Close Your Eyes, is a mystery of sorts about the disappearance of an actor, just as it is about bigger existential questions about life itself. It’s a breathtakingly melancholic film infused with mourning, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations about searching for something lost that may never be found. That only makes all the discoveries it makes that much more stunning to behold.

Close Your Eyes (2023) Miguel Garay, an aging filmmaker, is drawn back into the mystery of his last, unfinished project decades after his close friend and lead actor, Julio Arenas, disappeared during its production. With new interest sparked by a TV program revisiting the case, Miguel reconnects with those involved, seeking closure as he revisits a past overshadowed by loss and unresolved questions​.Release Date August 23, 2024 Director Victor Erice Cast Manolo Solo , José Coronado , Ana Torrent , Petra Martinez , María León , Mario Pardo , Helena Miquel , Antonio Dechent , Josep Maria Pou , Soledad Villamil , Juan Margallo , Venecia Franco Runtime 169 Minutes Main Genre Drama Writers Victor Erice , Michel Gaztambide Expand

What Is ‘Close Your Eyes’ About?

Wonderfully written with a deeply personal touch by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, it all begins with an extended conversation scene from a film within the film, The Farewell Gaze, that has nearly been all but forgotten. There is a meta quality to this, as Erice himself spent a good amount of time on a project that never came to fruition in the 90s, though it also is deeply grounded in the sense of loss that comes from something unfinished. The reason why this happens in the film is that its lead, Julio Arena (Jose Coronado), vanished and was never found. Speculation about what exactly happened to him has a greater legacy than the incomplete film and its director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), left behind filmmaking altogether. Only now, years later, in modern-day Madrid, he is drawn out of a reclusive existence by a TV investigation that will look into exactly what happened to Julio. As this part of his past comes back into the forefront of his life, he begins to reconnect with this history, uncovering parts of himself and the truths that have long been buried in a past that the world may soon leave behind. What those truths end up being is best left to the film, even if the developments that unravel are less thrilling than they are more tragic and tranquil.

When Miguel goes to talk with his projectionist friend Max (Mario Pardo) and retrieve footage from the unfinished film that will then be used in the television program, we begin to see this coming into focus. While the two characters settle into an old, familiar rhythm, with each actor gently expressing the parts of the men to each other we don’t see much of elsewhere, there is also a sadness that lingers over the conversation. Max speaks of how the reels and reels of film he has held onto, an irreplaceable part of cinema history, can’t be shown anywhere. They are now just gathering dust on shelves, forgotten as if they never even existed. There isn’t animosity about this, but a more quiet acceptance of how the world may no longer care for such things. For anyone who has ever worked to try to value expressions of beauty and art, when Max says that “this industry has gone down the drain,” it’s like a sudden jolt to the system, capturing the sinking feeling that everything worth cherishing may soon be lost.

And yet, Miguel carries on, journeying ahead with a disposition that can shift from resignation to fixation depending on the moment. He seems to both care little about the film that ended when his actor disappeared, selling it to the show as well as taking part in it despite it proving less than reverential in how it approaches this history, and cares quite a bit about every decision he makes, even if he won’t always speak this aloud. It’s a film profoundly interested in film just as it is the mundane nature of life outside the often magical worlds created therein, something that grows increasingly apparent as it makes interesting shifts in focus.

‘Close Your Eyes’ Is a Reflective Work About the Magical and the Mundane
Image via Film Movement

While the film is initially populated by extended, patient conversations Miguel shares with those like Max, each deceptively simple yet overflowing with emotion that cinematographer Valentín Álvarez often captures in extreme closeup, we soon pivot away to something entirely different. The first hint of this comes midway through one such conversation where Miguel begins to share from his imagination about what may have happened to Julio. More than that, it feels like he is almost wishing it into being, which we then see coming to life. It’s like a film Miguel has dreamt up and Álvarez again shoots it beautifully, molding his words into a quietly breathtaking scene that sneaks up on you. The entire snapshot is like a film of an imagined memory that Miguel desperately needs to be true, making the eventual return to reality in the latter half of the film and the unexpected revelations that follow all the more moving.

Erice, in every single moment, grapples with how this life is not like the movies we may happen to make while living it. They aren’t real, no matter how much we want them to be, yet that doesn’t mean they can’t shape our lives all the same. For Erice, the answers in our world end up being much simpler, but that only makes our desire to dream whenever we can that much more critical to existence itself. No matter how much we grasp for it, cinema, art, and life care little for our wants. You’ll want to hold Erice’s film tight, but much like the water pouring from a shoe you turn over after wading into the fleeting moments of wonder, it reminds us how the memories of life’s mundanities can all too easily slip through our fingers.

REVIEW Close Your Eyes (2023) Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes is yet another magnificent work of cinema that is as beautifully shot as it is breathtakingly moving.ProsThe film is a mystery of sorts that soon asks essential questions about life itself, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations.It’s a surprising, deeply moving work that shifts from extended, patient scenes to something entirely different yet no less beautiful.Erice’s film becomes like a snapshot of an imagined memory, leaving us wanting to hold it tight just as we too realize that it will all too easily slip through our fingers.

Close Your Eyes is now playing in select theaters in the U.S. before expanding. Click below for showtimes near you.

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