Félix Viscarret successfully brings to the big screen the novel that Juan José Millás published in 2016 under the title ‘From the Shadow’
The starting point of ‘Don’t look into the eyes’ is as disconcerting and tense as it is attractive. Damián (Paco León), a rather solitary guy with few words, goes to his workplace like every day, a workshop where they make wooden furniture. Shortly after arriving, the person in charge of him calls him to the office and they fire him. Furious and without saying a word to his companions, he approaches the cash register and destroys it. When his boss storms out of the office, Damián runs away and hides in an old closet that rests on top of a moving company’s truck. There, motionless and practically in the dark, he patiently waits for the workers to transport the heavy bundle to his new home: a chalet located in a residential area on the outskirts of the city. Once inside the house, and with extreme care, Damián comes out of the closet and hides under the bed of Fede (Àlex Brendemühl) and Lucía (Leonor Watling), a couple who lives with his teenage daughter. Apparently, the wardrobe was part of the house where Lucía lived with her parents and is a very special memory for the woman. At night, when the couple has fallen asleep, Damián thinks about leaving the house but, caught up in curiosity, he decides to stay in the house of what will be his new family.
Nothing is plausible in ‘Don’t look into the eyes’, just as it wasn’t in ‘From the Shadow’, the novel that Juan José Millás published in 2016 through Seix Barral and which inspired a film that is difficult to describe, which It touches on all kinds of genres -there is drama, comedy, thriller, suspense, romance and terror- and it begins in an almost suffocating way, until it opens little by little, as Damián begins to be part of the life of this family , as if it were a spectrum. The key is in the built-in wardrobe in front of which Lucía has placed the old piece of furniture, where Damián will begin to make his new life. From that privileged place, on the other side of the double bottom, of the mirror, Damián will observe a life very different from his own, a life led by a couple who already seems quite deteriorated and a girl immersed in a rather toxic relationship. He will not stay there and will begin to interact at first in a timid way, but with increasing forcefulness until he becomes a ghostly presence.
Directed by Félix Viscarret (Pamplona, 1975), the film is right when it comes to entering the peculiar universe of Millás, transporting the viewer to a surreal world from the everyday and the costumbrista. With a commendable narrative rhythm, Viscarret manages to make the interior of the character, built around imaginary interviews, or not?, with journalists, both fictional and real, to be as attractive as the adventures that this family lives attached to. In this sense, Paco León’s interpretation hits the nail on the head, moving away from the comedy that has given him so much, and placing on the table a range of emotions and registers that range from vulnerability to the coldness of someone who seems to have nothing to do with lose. Thus, León manages to make the viewer empathize with the protagonist, despite the fact that a large part of his actions are, clearly, crazy and reprehensible. With few brushstrokes, but very well articulated, Viscarret and David Muñoz, co-writers of the story, are able to describe this marginal man who doesn’t seem to have any problems leaving his life behind and who, paradoxically, ends up ‘fitting’ into the life of others.
Enigmatic and suggestive, ‘Don’t look into the eyes’ is an entertaining proposal that uses the impossible to describe the fascination that almost all of us feel for the lives of others. An intelligent and different film, which can only be asked for a little more containment in the footage.
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