DVD Review: Everlasting Love

The opening scene of Everlasting Love has a documentary feel, as people are asked by a man off screen how they go about hooking up. And they talk, somewhat candidly, somewhat embarrassedly, about flirting and crushes and about the idea of love lasting forever. One girl says, “When you fall in love it’s because you think it’s going to be eternal.” But a guy then opines: “I don’t think eternal love exists. I think there are powerful moments when you think it may last forever. But then you hurt yourself.”

It’s an interesting opening, yet doesn’t quite prepare you for the completely engaging and absorbing and unsettling story that follows. The film shows us a couple arguing, a relationship disintegrating, the girlfriend left behind. But we see it from a distance, the camera behind them, off to the side, like it is (and thus we are) spying on them. And indeed, an older man is watching them from his car. This scene establishes a voyeuristic angle that the film maintains, more or less, throughout. While the man, Carlos (Joan Bentallé), goes off into the woods, the girlfriend is suddenly grabbed by another man. The film creates a strange and haunting reality, and when we follow Carlos, for a moment we think we’ll never know what befell this girl, that she is just one detail in a creepy landscape. Carlos spies on several different people – men, women, couples. But one young man, Toni (Aimar Vega), looks back at him with recognition. The girl, now unconscious, is brought to a group of people that this young man is a part of. One member of this group asks, “Is she going to stay with us?” It’s so unsettling an atmosphere that I am immediately pulled into this film.

The film then cuts to a classroom, where Toni is a student and Carlos is the teacher. And because we were so quickly immersed in that strange world of the forest, this normal world now seems strange to us, and just as unsettling. Toni asks for a ride home, and Carlos speaks quite openly about meeting one-night stands in that area of the woods. It’s interesting that while they talk, we see them in close-up, but then when they have sex in the car later, we see it from a bit of a distance, which has the effect of making it colder, more alien, and again giving it a voyeuristic bent. The camera does slowly close in on them, almost like we’re getting bolder in our watching. But what’s also interesting is that the closer we get, the harder it is to see. Adding to the film’s unsettling atmosphere is its sound design, by the way.

And though Carlos impresses upon Toni the fact that their love-making was a one-time thing, Toni tries to see him again. And after Toni doesn’t show up to class a couple of times, Carlos goes looking for him, interested in him in spite of himself. Carlos has a colleague with whom he’s talked about cruising the forest area and so on, and this colleague turns out to be a bit of a voyeur himself. Meanwhile, we see that Joana, the girlfriend, has now become a part of the group that abducted her, her hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. It may seem difficult to get a grasp on the world of this film. You just have to go along for the ride. And it’s definitely worth it. I got completely sucked into this film, and I feel it’s one that’s going to stay with me for a while.

Everlasting Love was directed by Marçal Forés, and was released on DVD on November 3, 2015 through TLA Releasing. The film is presented in its original Spanish, with English subtitles. The DVD includes the film’s trailer.