When Vera awakens the next day she finds herself in a parallel universe where her life has been turned upside down and what she once knew, now a distant memory – including her daughter. As the strange 72 hour storm begins again, Vera finds out more about the boy and somehow manages to communicate with him through the television via the old tapes he recorded.įrom here, the story really picks up as Vera warns Nico away from veering outside and subsequently saves him from his fated death. Fast forward to November 9th 2014 and Vera and her family look forward to spending their life together in the same house Nico once lived in. As a freak 72 hour storm closes in, Nico witnesses a horrific crime across the street and, as he runs outside to take a closer look, ends up being hit by a car.

The story begins on November 9th 1989 with a 12-year-old boy practicing the guitar, recording himself on the TV. With enough twists and turns along the way and an empathetic lead character at its helm, Mirage does well to keep its intrigue running throughout its 2 hour run time. They are, ironically enough, a fleeting mirage, there and then forgotten just as quickly.Split across two separate time periods and boasting an unpredictable story, Spanish Netflix Original Mirage is an interesting and well written sci-fi thriller. But the film’s plot and characters don’t ripple through into our reality. Vera’s attempts to figure all this out are also the audience’s the appeal of Mirage is its trickiness, its cleverness, and its overall design. The point, of course, is that reality is suddenly unrecognizable for Vera, who is transplanted into an alternate life where she excelled in the career she abandoned, where David is married to someone else, where Prieto (Javier Gutierrez), Nico’s murderous neighbor, roams free, and where Gloria is nowhere to be found. You can see, in the story of mothers and children and of memories wrenched away, where a lot of the feeling should be, but Mirage moves at such a breakneck clip and incorporates so many madcap turns that the film struggles to anchor its emotional beats to any kind of recognizable reality. Paulo - who co-wrote the script alongside Lara Sendim - is an impressive crafter of narrative machinery, though not necessarily emotional frameworks. Mirage happily plays with genre and its own time-bending influences, taking great delight in allowing audiences to be swept up in its bold imagination. Portentous storms link the two individuals across jostling realities, where changing the past is just as much a possibility as losing the present, and the future teeters uncertainly beyond an ominous 72-hour deadline. Proudly complex and precisely engineered, it’s a fun experience to try and unpack, but its expansiveness and ambition make it difficult to care about or engage with emotionally.įor some, that won’t be a problem the fun is in trying to piece together the temporal jigsaw that separates a young boy, Nico (Julio Bohigas), and the woman, Vera (Adriana Ugarte), who moves into his house with her husband David (Alvaro Morte) and her daughter Gloria (Luna Fulgencio) some 25 years after his apparent death.

Oriol Paulo’s Mirage, known in its romantic-sounding native Spanish as Durante la Tormenta, is a genre-blending, twisty-turny time-travel film that seems to revel in that, sometimes to its detriment. A slick and clever film that is unfortunately devoid of emotional believability, Mirage will nonetheless appeal to genre fans.

Mirage movie