Mirage (Oriol Paulo)

[Grouchy]

[Grouchy]

I just wanted to start by saying that I got the director's name wrong at first from memory and wrote Olio Rabal, which is a perfectly valid fantasy name for a Spaniard.

Anyway, I'd seen the director's previous twisty Netflix thriller The Invisible Guest and... I liked that one better. This one offers the same formula of good-looking movie stars involved in Twilight Zone scenarios in which nothing is quite what it seems, but... It's a lot easier to see where this is going, and it's nowhere fun. It becomes soapy with overwritten emotionality, and the characters are mostly blanks. I hate to write off a guy like that but so far Paulo's work makes him a poor man's Alejandro Amenábar.

For those curious about the plot, it's about a house with a TV and VCR recorder attached to it in 1989. They belong to a young kid who dies tragically during an electrical storm. In 2018, during a similar metereological event, the new owner of the house (who has just learned of the tragic story) finds the hidden TV, communicates with the kid in 1989 and saves his life by telling him what not to do. Unfortunately, this causes a timeline update event and she wakes up to find out she doesn't own the house, she never married and her daughter doesn't exist. This is the first act.