Gonzalo Calzada’s ghost story Nocturna is broken up into two distinct films: Side A, the more linear narrative, and Side B, an abstracted addendum that parallels the events of Side A. Narratively, Nocturna tells the story of elderly Ulises (Pepe Soriano) who lives a life bordering on reclusive, his only companion being his wife Dalia (Marilú Marini), who imposes a constant fear that the building association is going to forcibly remove them from their apartment due to their age and their home’s lack of upkeep. Stuck in the same daily routine and spurred by a series of disquieting encounters with neighbors, Ulises reaches his breaking point, spiraling down a rabbit hole of his own memories and regrets.
The films combine to create a psychodrama on loss, family, fading memory, and loneliness. The horror that occurs here is less about inflicting harm on Ulises and more focused on the trauma of characters struggling to come to terms with where they’ve found themselves and how they’ve managed to get there. We as viewers are often steps ahead of Ulises on his journey of realization and acceptance, and watching the old man try to piece together the vague snippets of his faded memories is at times melancholic verging into devastating. The set design of Ulises’s decrepit apartment is well executed, heightening the sense of faded beauty leading to decay and tension of a collapsing and forgotten past.
While reaching some poignant emotional moments, Calzada has a frustrating tendency to linger too long, letting the score overtake the poignancy and verge into cheap melodrama. That said, the diptych films of Nocturna are at the very least an inventive imagining of an end-of-life story, capturing both the beauty and the melancholy that make up our memories. Side A: 107 min, Side B: 67 min.
Wide release on VOD
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