Watch the movie Mirage at one of these online streaming confectionaries:
Hahahaha. Occasionally, a movie makes me feel like someone took a hand blender, pops my skullcap open, and just blends away my cerebral grey matter. And Mirage (originally entitled, Durante la tormenta – or During the Storm) is just such a movie. If you dig crazy movies that just unhinge your head completely, then dang, Mirage is your movie. There’s a dash of time travel, a dash of multiverse string theory, heck there’s even discussions of Hilbert Spaces, Cosmic Web Theory…there’s all kinds of mindjob goodness in this movie. And because this movie is right over there ——-> in that other tab you have open for Netflix, it’s simple enough for you to stop everything and watch it.
Oh, I’m sorry, did I forget to mention that the movie is in Spanish? Geeze. “But I don’t like reading my movies.” Then your movie world is going to be severely limited. And this movie proves that more than any other (well, that and the French movie Transit, which I reviewed just the other day)…but there is without a doubt, no lack of foreign language films today that are all worth our time.
Netflix Movie Mirage Walkthrough
First things first, we’ll talk through the basic details of the movie. And then, after we do that we’ll do another overview of the movie, but not sequentially per se, but rather an outline of the various timeline loops and their effects on the participants. Or something like that. It’ll make sense once you see it.
A storm is hitting Spain. A big storm. A storm so big, that it may actually split the space time continuum and cause all manner of chaos. And our story begins back in 1989, with a boy named Nicolás Lasarte Leira, and his video recorder. While recording, he hears chaos happening from next door, investigates, and sees that Hilda Weiss has been stabbed to death. Nico runs, and is hit by a car and is killed while crossing the street.
Cut to 25 years in the future, and a woman named Vera. Their family has recently moved into Nico’s home and they discover his recording equipment. And the exact same storm that clobbered Spain 25 years prior has returned, and somehow, Vera begins to see back in time to when Nico was recording, just before he died. But this time, knowing Nico is about to die, Vera convinces Nico to not investigate the murder across the street. Nico listens, but causes all manner of chaos as a result of his inaction.
Vera, once married and with a daughter, now has neither of those things, but is now a vaunted neurosurgeon. Better yet, in this secondary timeline Angel, the murderer of his wife, got away with it. Well, Vera is determined to do literally anything she can to get her daughter back. In this new timeline, Vera had performed surgery on David, but they never met via her friendship with Aitor. And Aitor’s mother is married to Angel, the neighbor across the street – but we’ll get to this momentarily. But Vera, she didn’t drop out of med-school to stay home and watch her baby girl. And determined to get her daughter and husband back, she goes to the police to tell her sordid tale of time-traveling weirdness and chaos.
Now, jumping past Karen Sardon’s book about Nico and his time traveling communications with Vera. And jumping past all manner of detective work between Vera and the police, we learn that they only have a few hours left before the storm dissipates and with it Vera’s window to get her daughter back. And remembering that Angel was going to bury his wife on the grounds of his abattoir, but couldn’t because he was caught, (today’s vocab word of the day, along with, prestidigitation, and mastication) Vera takes the police out to find Hilda Weiss’ body. And then the police take in Angel, as well as his new wife, Clara Medina. Meanwhile, Vera takes the address given to her by the police and finds that David is having an affair. Ultimately, Vera finds Nico and learns that Nico is the lead detective helping her with her “lost daughter.”
Wait Who Is Nico Again?
OK, so stop a second. Did you catch that, the police detective, who has been helping Vera since the beginning of timeline2 reboot, is Nico. Twenty five years later, he is grown up, and hell-bent on solving the Angel murder next door. And that is how we learned that in this timeline, when Nico chose to not to get involved with the murder, he was forced to give back the watch he “stole” from the house, and for the next years, he suffers all manner of psychoanalysis and mental interventions for his time-traveling psychosis. But he never gave up looking for Vera, the woman he knew he would see again in 25 years. And his obsession was so big that he ended up accidentally derailing Vera’s life with David as well as the birth of her daughter.
Does that make sense? So, in timeline two, instead of Vera’s relationship with David her husband, she is swept away into a relationship with Nico. But when the timeline splinters, she doesn’t remember any of that. All she knows is timeline one, because those are her memories, and is her life. And because Vera knows that her time in timeline2 without her daughter is over, she knows that she is done there. Which is why she knows that she can commit suicide and expect that Nico will do absolutely anything he can to get back to Vera. Well, to do that, Nicolas uses his old TV to connect back to timeline1, and tells Nico that he needs his help.
And just like the previous two timelines, Vera snaps awake, wondering what this timeline holds for her. And there, in her bed, is David, her husband from timeline1. Vera finds the matches she threw outside, and this is her confirmation that timeline3 is actually a re-coupling of timeline2 and timeline1. But now, Vera knows that David is an adulterer. And she also knows that Angel, who is free again, is a murderer. So, Vera heads to the abattoir and digs up Angel’s wife’s remains. And then she heads to the police in order to tell them about the murder, and about how she knows what happened. And in so doing, she meets Nico again…but this time, Nico has no idea who she is or the relationship they have had in timeline2, because it never happened.
One of the key details that I sort of glossed over, was the fact that the reason Angel was able to get away with Hilda’s murder in timeline2, was because he used Clara Medina (his lover) to impersonate Hilda, via new passport documents. She also utilized Hilda’s bank account in order to make it appear like she was alive. But it was the watch, with the inscription of CM on the back that proved Clara Medina wasn’t Hilda Weiss.
That Was Too Fast Explain Again
I know that as I walked us through the film I basically regurgitated the film as it happened on the screen. But if you look at it again from Nico’s perspective we can gain a deeper understanding for what actually happened:
- T1 – 1989 – Nico is recording and hears the murder happening
- T1 – He investigates and is hit by a car and dies
- T1 – 2014 – Vera tells Nico to not investigate the murder
- T2 – 1989 – Nico doesn’t investigate, and survives
- T2 – ’89-’00 – Nico is under psych eval & watch
- T2 – Nico becomes a police detective and finds Vera
- T2 – Nico & Vera don’t have kids
- T2 – 2014 – Vera snaps into T2 from T1 and forgets Nico
- T2 – Nico and Vera solve the murder and arrest Angel
- T2 – Vera realizes Nico has to solve her daughter problem
- T2 – Nico contacts himself in T1 1989 and asks for help
- T3 – 1989 – Nico doesn’t investigate the murder
- T3 – Nico also leaves Vera alone, just like his older self asked
- T3 – 2014 – Vera finds Hilda Weiss’ body
- T3 – Vera introduces herself to the lead investigator, Nico
Does that make a little bit more sense? So, can we know what happened after Vera introduces herself to Nico? Well, yes, we can actually. We know that Vera’s husband, David, is an unfaithful git. And we know that she knows because she was actually on to him at the beginning of the movie, and got the final confirmation she needed with the matches in the secondary timeline (when David wasn’t her husband). So, similarly to Nico explaining their life together before she jumped, Vera will most likely explain what happened in their lives together in the previous timeline.
And after that? Nico will most likely falsify evidence against David, and have him sent to prison for a very long time. Or something like that.
Final Thoughts on Mirage
It is really really rare, ultra rare, über rare even, for a time travel or a multi-verse movie to be as nicely tied up as Mirage is at the end. I mean, everything snapped together perfectly. Even Vera’s collapse of her marriage and child’s existence was looped back into the larger story. The bow on the various threads is just impeccable. The writers on Mirage really need a standing ovation.
Edited by, CY