review of Cerrar los ojos — Close Your Eyes. Spain, 2024.
Directed by Víctor Erice.
Have you ever heard about Spain’s famous ghost-director? His name is Víctor Erice.
He’s made only four films in fifty years.
Four. That’s it.
And People still talk about them. Quietly. Like legends.
He disappeared. For decades.
And now… he’s come back.
With a film called Close Your Eyes.
A film about vanishing. Disappearance. Memory. And cinema as both witness and accomplice.
Because this isn’t just a theme — it’s the plot itself.
An actor disappears during the shooting of a film. Thirty years later, he’s found in a nursing home. No memory. No explanation.
His best friend, Miguel — the director of that unfinished film — is called by a tacky true-crime show to revisit the story. He needs the money. But maybe, more than that, he needs to make peace with his past.
What unfolds is not a thriller. Not really.
It’s a meditation.
🧠 The Real Story
Close Your Eyes isn’t just about the mystery of the missing actor. It’s about what’s missing in all of us: memory, love, youth, connection — and how cinema tries, and fails, and tries again to hold it all together.
Erice gives us Miguel, living in a trailer, estranged from art, from people, from himself. He revisits old friends: the editor who lives surrounded by celluloid ghosts. The singer he once loved. The daughter of the vanished actor — played, brilliantly, by Ana Torrent, the child star from Erice’s first movie Spirit of the Beehive.
This film is Erice’s reckoning with his own haunted career. A director who made only three films before vanishing himself.
🎥 Meta but Not Masturbatory
Yes, it’s a film about film.
But this isn’t one of those Oscar-bait nostalgia trips — you know the type: black-and-white for no reason, childhood memories, cheap emotion.
Close Your Eyes doesn’t beg for your tears.
It’s quieter. Stranger.
And a lot more honest.
Think 8½ or All That Jazz — but softer.
Less razzle-dazzle, more the low hum of a projector at midnight.
This isn’t Erice romanticizing cinema.
It’s him asking what’s left when the reels stop turning.
When the people are gone.
When the stories fade.
And still — something lingers. Not the movie. The echo.
🧭 Themes: Identity, Memory, and the Soft Violence of Time
What happens when you forget who you are?
Are you still… you?
If nobody remembers you, do you vanish?
Or is forgetting — maybe — a grace? A way to start over?
Close Your Eyes asks whether a life without memory is still a life worth living. Whether we’re defined by what we remember — or by how others remember us. And what role does the image — film, photo, reel — play in preserving a person?
🧃 It Meanders. But It Earns It.
Yes, it’s long. Almost three hours. Yes, it drifts, digresses, and broods.
But like memory, like grief, it doesn’t follow a script.
And when the third act comes, it lands.
Hard.
The payoff is not in spectacle. It’s in quiet return. In faces that have aged, in voices that remember, in one final reel screened in a re-opened theater — not to resurrect the past, but to gently bless it.
🎭 Cultural Ghosts
The film is steeped in ghosts: of Francoist Spain, of lost friendships, of analog cinema.
Max, the editor, clings to his reels and stereo and velvet couch like sacred relics. Lola, the singer, clings to her longing. Ana Torrent’s museum guide wonders if art loses its magic when it becomes routine. And Miguel? He wonders if it’s too late for one more act.
These aren’t just characters. They’re avatars of an old way of living — one that’s been replaced by algorithms, HD, and endless content. But Erice doesn’t scold. He grieves. And in that grief, he gives us something rare: grace.
Not resolution. Not answers. Just a quiet, human grace.
Close Your Eyes doesn’t build to a reveal — it builds to a moment.
Two people. One final image. No words.
It’s not closure.
It’s recognition.
A flicker of something that might be memory. Or love. Or just presence.
And somehow, that’s enough.
🧠 So What?
This isn’t just a film about cinema.
It’s about identity — and what happens when the story you were living… breaks.
When the job disappears.
When the project falls apart.
When the person you used to be doesn’t come back.
Close Your Eyes asks: who are you without your memories?
But let’s flip it.
Who are you beyond your résumé?
Because some of you — listening right now — are stuck in a version of yourself that’s no longer true.
