Quietly Transcendent ‘Close Your Eyes’ May Be Among the Best Films You See All Year

The Spanish director Víctor Erice is one of our most revered, yet least prolific, European filmmakers. Over the past 50 years or so, he’s directed just four features, starting with his masterful debut, The Spirit of the Beehive.

That movie was a haunting family drama set in 1940, during the early days of the Franco dictatorship. It was also a passionate ode to cinema from a filmmaker who’s always loved the movies, even when the movies haven’t loved him back.

Erice had a rough time with his 1983 film El Sur, a beautiful yet truncated work that was released in its unfinished form. In the years since, Erice has directed a number of projects, including the 1992 documentary The Quince Tree Sun and several shorts.

But he has struggled to get another fiction feature off the ground — until now. The arrival of Erice’s new movie, Close Your Eyes, would be welcome news even if it weren’t one of the best things I’ve seen this year. Manolo Solo plays a long-retired director named Miguel, who quit the biz in 1990, after one of his films shut down production. The circumstances were mysterious: His star, a handsome actor named Julio Arenas, vanished without explanation and was presumed dead. Now, it’s 2012, and a Madrid-based TV journalist is investigating Julio’s disappearance.

After he’s interviewed, Miguel stays in Madrid and makes inquiries of his own. While Close Your Eyes unfolds at a leisurely pace over nearly three hours, it has the pull of a well-crafted detective story. Miguel reaches out to old friends and colleagues, like his longtime editor, Max, a hardcore cinephile who still has the never-screened footage from that halted production.

You don’t have to know Erice’s work to get swept up in Close Your Eyes. But those who do know his work will find the new film an almost unbearably moving experience. Erice is, in many ways, telling his own story: Miguel could be his stand-in, just as Miguel’s unfinished film feels like a meta-commentary on some of Erice’s own abandoned projects. Miguel and his old editor, Max, reminisce about earlier, better times for the film industry and grouse about the changes wrought by digital technology.

But despite his characters’ pessimism, Erice continues to show a hard-won faith in the movies. He knows that they can move us in ways that no other art form can. At one point, Erice ushers all his characters into a dilapidated old movie theatre, which is where Close Your Eyes becomes not just an engaging film, but a quietly transcendent one. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but it’s worth discovering for yourself, in a movie theatre of your own.

‘Close Your Eyes’ is released nationwide on Aug. 23, 2024.