What a strange and frustrating mess this is. Writer-director Gee Malik Linton reportedly envisaged a lengthy metaphysical head-scratcher of a film with thriller elements, called Daughter of God. It was wrenched from his hands by the distributor and chopped down to make some sort of slow-moving police drama with a slow-moving lead performance from Keanu Reeves as a troubled cop. Linton disowned it, and the film now carries the Alan Smithee-type director’s credit of “Declan Dale”.
Would the original, full-length film have been a masterpiece? I guess we’ll never know. I suspect it would just be a longer version of this, in which a beautiful young woman, Isabel de La Cruz (Ana de Armas), experiences ecstatic dream-visions connected to a crime that Detective Galban (Reeves) is investigating. There are some interestingly designed scenes, but also some rather odd borrowings from Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, and it all hangs on a very tiresome reveal of the sort that has been popping up since the days of German expressionism.
