Review: The fears of motherhood blend with the unexplainable in the thriller ‘Fever Dream’

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Narrated from a not so distant future, like a commentary track on shared memories, the sensually mystifying thriller “Fever Dream” from Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (“The Milk of Sorrow”) is aptly structured as a nonlinear oneiric vision retracing the steps of two women at the precipice where man-made catastrophe and supernatural intervention clash.

The voices chronicling the fragmented recollections are those of Amanda (María Valverde), a Spanish national visiting her Argentine father’s rural hometown with her young daughter, and David (Emilio Vodanovich), a seemingly maladjusted local boy whose mother, Carola (Dolores Fonzi), believes he’s dangerous. Superstition has overtaken Carola’s reason after her child almost died from poisoning. Half of his soul, she thinks, migrated to another body.

Llosa, a filmmaker with an affinity for the unexplainable, mines acute observations on the apprehensions of motherhood from Samanta Schweblin’s novel, designing a serpentine narrative teeming with impending doom for all participants. The more Amanda and Carola, strangers quickly turned intimate friends reveling in unspoken sexual tension, become involved, the more the former’s perceptions become hazy, though we are not certain if it’s physical, psychosomatic or a spiritual invasion of her body.

Worried for her girl in this unusual place, Amanda obsesses over the “rescue distance” (the literal translation of the source material’s title in Spanish), a concept referring to how far a mother can be from her offspring and still have enough time to intervene before tragedy strikes. Valverde walks her character from innocuous curiosity to a disturbed state with sturdy naturalness, while Fonzi exudes the glamorous intensity of a classic Hollywood star. Attentive to each other’s changing moods, the actresses summon chemistry from the contrast.

As the voiceover dictates, the film’s visual choices, both in its close-up heavy cinematography and the elliptical grammar of the editing, zero in on the details hidden in every frame or expand the perspective through which the events are witnessed. Resembling Amanda’s unconscious, most scenes reverberate with a dreamlike sensorial quality and are just cryptic enough to entice our interest. Moments of unsettling surprise, tied to David’s behavior, keep a layer of fear present.

Elegantly intoxicating in its atmospheric construction, “Fever Dream” maintains its incantation to its very final twist. Even as clues inch us closer to a logical explanation for the collective malaise, the mystical undercurrent Llosa sets in place fosters our doubt.