Close Your Eyes (2024) Movie Drinking Game & Review

Take a Sip: every time it switches perspectives into or out of the movie within the movie.

Do a Shot: when you first sense that the action onscreen is meant to directly reflect the life and career of the film’s director, Victor Erice.

Finish your Drink: for each hour that passes in the film’s running time.

For many years and quite a few generations of blossoming film enthusiasts, it seemed very unlikely – some might even say impossible – that anyone would ever see a brand new film from Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice ever again. After a pair of highly acclaimed and internationally beloved works – The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur, respectively – Erice struggled to come up with his next project for nearly a decade, and his last project of any significance was a documentary from over thirty years ago, called Dream of Light. Since then, with a handful of potential projects constantly flowing in and out of development, just about everyone in the cinephile world was resigned to the fact that the career of this once extremely promising talent was long behind him.

That was, until the announcement of this latest project back in 2022. A Spanish and Argentinian co-production, Close Your Eyes had its much anticipated world premiere at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in 2023, although Victor Erice himself was not present at the ceremony. It was met with a reliably strong reception immediately following its initial screening, and has now finally received its international distribution.

Close Your Eyes concerns the disappearance of fictional Spanish actor Julio Arenas, and the impact his sudden absence had on not just the movie he was in the middle of production of, but also the effect it had on those closest to him and the rippling effects his missing persons case had on the culture he was formerly as the very beating heart of. Decades after the initial incident, a sensationalist true crime sort of series revives the case and brings the whole mystery back into the public eye. On the case and heavily involved in this revival is (also fictional) filmmaker Miguel Garay, who has close personal ties not just to the long absent Arenas, but also has his own deeply rooted connections to the world of Spanish language cinema, which very well could have been the main reason behind the disappearance of his longtime friend.

With that premise and the awareness of director Victor Erice’s past experiences in the realm of world cinema, it would seem pretty clear that this is a deeply personal and extremely self-reflective work. Indeed, Close Your Eyes is a film that’s very much in conversation with the past, not just of the world of film, but also that of the man behind the camera, who is giving it life. Yet, it’s able to maintain this level of meta-textuality and breaking of the fourth wall without coming across as ponderous or navel-gazing in the slightest. That the film strikes a perfect balance between the deeply layered storytelling on display and the very compelling drama on the surface is a huge testament to the filmmaking prowess of Victor Erice, and gives a taste of what we’ve been missing out on during the decades the world of film has gone without having him around.

Whether you approach this as the long awaited return of one of the most exciting and unique voices of world cinema from the past half century, or if taken solely on its own terms as a standalone film, Close Your Eyes is well worth experiencing. It manages to strike a balance that films with tens or even hundreds of times its budget and the amount of resources often fail to do and most of the time don’t even attempt, in that it simultaneously feels very grand and large in its scope, while also feeling very personal and intimate at the same time. In a cinematic landscape that increasingly feels as beholden by the wills of shareholders and corporate greed as ever, films as dominated by the visions and souls of their creators as this need to be sought out and experienced for the rare beasts that they are these days.