Fever Dream (2021)

directed by Claudia Llosa

Chile, Peru

93 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If I had to name one book that I considered to be "unfilmable", it would probably be Samanta Schweblin's aptly-titled Fever Dream. I don't recommend watching this movie without some context - whether that's reading the book or just familiarizing yourself with the plot, if you lack context, this movie will come off weird. The original book took me and many others by surprise because its style of narration is so thoroughly opaque that in the process of telling its story it reveals almost nothing, and how do you get that to work in a movie? Not through visual symbolism, in this case, and thankfully not by unraveling the book's plot so bluntly as to ruin all of its ominous vagueness. But in the end, while the book's plot is handled well, I'm still not so sure it works on film.

So the reason why I think this movie will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the book is because it doesn't feel like it's attempting to do anything other than be exactly like the book, which is good for me because that's what I wanted to see, but not good for casual watching with no foreknowledge. The synopsis you can find online makes claims about the characters' motivations that simply are not there: "A powerful, haunting story of obsessive jealousy, an invisible danger, and the power of a mother’s love for her child" is just not what this movie is. The bizarre nature of the book overshadows anything about the individual characters, and without that incredibly strange narrative style, all you have is a movie where no one aspect is ever given enough weight to feel balanced. It struggles to mesh the human aspects mentioned in the synopsis with the tricky task of staying close to the book's style. But the good thing is that the film does still include a lot of that original weirdness: the narration, a conversation between the main character and her neighbor's son, is still there, and is taken almost word-for-word from the book, so you get the fullness of the original intended effect. It was when the film tried to insert anything that wasn't present in the book that it started to feel forced.

I'm going to lay out a very bare-bones summary of the plot just so I don't sound like a big weirdo, so if you've seen or read neither book nor movie, skip this paragraph and the next. Fever Dream is, I believe, an environmental horror story at its roots, or at least a horror story in which the environment plays a big role. The book is narrated, like I said, by the main character conversing with her neighbor's son, both of whom have been affected mentally and physically by a toxic chemical used on the plants around their houses. The main character is delirious, possibly dying, and in fear for her own child, and her neighbor's son, who became sick from the chemical some years earlier, is attempting to guide her through a haze of physical/mental pain to make her realize what happened to her. Or, quite possibly, the son is not really there, and is a production of the main character's mind to get her to come to terms with things. Fever Dream is an uncomfortable book because all of the horror comes from the very realistically rendered sensation of not being able to trust your own mind, or even really to operate your own mind. It's the terror of losing all function, and then to make things worse, your child is also at risk and you are no longer in control of your body enough to help them.

I have to say that the movie actually gets a leg up on the book in my opinion by making more explicit, or at least giving more attention to, the possibility of supernatural events playing into the story. The book teased me with this and in fact the only reason I read it was because I understood it to be more of a traditional horror story, when in actuality it can be best described as a horrific story masquerading as a horror story. But the movie heavily involves the possibility of a strange spiritual dislocation and that combines well with the biological sickness that is definitely there.

Thankfully, the movie understands the importance of how the book tells its story, and preserves that as best it can. You do not realize or understand about the connection between the main character's state and the chemicals in the water and in the grass until as late as possible. In the book you may not get it at all on the first reading. There are some things that made me uncomfortable regarding the way disability was portrayed, like a scene where a disabled girl is focused on that seemed to imply nothing but a fear of somebody who is physically different (or fear of becoming like that). This isn't a random, isolated scene of bashing disabled people, it is relevant to the plot in that it tells you something about the danger inherent in the environment where the characters are, but... in the end it still kind of feels like a poorly-handled message about disability being terrifying. The book does not present it that way, but focuses more, like I said, on the awfulness of being unable to help your child, with no real emphasis on disability being the result or cause of that.

It's actually weird that people seem to be very bothered by the film withholding its conclusion, because that's kind of the whole point of this. It's vague and unsettling because the feeling of not knowing what's happening to you or your body is vague and unsettling. If we knew right off the bat what was going on, we couldn't feel that way. Maybe it's a fault on the film's part that people aren't getting that and are just being frustrated by its refusal to serve up the story in simpler terms. But ultimately, aside from the exposition dump in the last twenty minutes when it veers off from the source material, I think this is probably the best adaptation of Schweblin's downright unfilmable book we're going to get. Would love to know the author's thoughts on this.