Close Your Eyes

At once a mystery about an actor’s sudden disappearance, and a meditation on memory, identity, friendship – and the power of cinema.

Víctor Erice’s first feature in three decades is a characteristically ambitious meditation on memory, identity, family, friendship… and cinema. Twenty years after an actor’s mysterious disappearance led to a movie-shoot being abandoned, the director reluctantly contributes to a missing-persons television documentary which, once broadcast, has unexpected consequences for a great many people.

Besides succeeding splendidly as engrossing drama, Close Your Eyes is rewarding as a magisterial summation of Erice’s abiding preoccupations. Drawing and building on his own earlier films and unfinished projects while paying tribute to admired auteurs (Sternberg, Hawks, Ray et al), Erice has created a lovely, multi-layered work that is deeply personal, psychologically astute, philosophically profound, and very moving in its warm, generous humanity.