To be seen is a form of existence.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Set in a suspended time and place — vaguely evoked as “the late 1980s” but emptied of any historical concreteness — Invisibili moves like a restless soul between the realm of the living and the dead, inhabiting neither fully. Set in an imaginary village, the film aspires to tell the story of the pain felt by the non-aligned, by those who cannot find a shared code to exist in the world. But in its attempt to craft a parable about exclusion and the complexity of being seen, it stumbles over itself, trapped by its own aesthetic and a screenplay that often mistakes symbolism for vagueness.
At its center are Elise, a ghost with the eternal face of a child, and Tommy, a teenager afflicted by a sensitivity that the film insists is profound but which only manifests through an aesthetic of discomfort. Tommy draws unsettling characters, messages from a psychological elsewhere that remains illustrated, not experienced. And when he says to his peers, “you have no idea what runs through a madman’s mind,” the tone feels closer to theatrical provocation than a real cry of despair. The echo of the line — “if you want, hit hard” — leaves no wounds, does not resonate. It’s a threat lacking tragic depth, because it is never earned through the narrative.
Elise, too — eternally playing a Chopin nocturne — utters metaphysical pronouncements like “music is for the living,” as if to separate sound from flesh, art from life. But the film cannot bear the weight of the profundities it voices. “Tell me you’re able to see the complexity,” Elise pleads — but it’s the film itself that, scene after scene, proves its inability to sustain the complexity it invokes. Each pathos-laden phrase is left hanging, like a sacred object no one dares to touch, but which ultimately holds no weight.
The attempt to dignify invisibility fails the moment it becomes romanticized. The “different,” the marginalized, the “invisible” — who are meant to embody radical otherness — are treated as saints or ghosts, never as living beings. It is said that the invisible can also be diabolical, bearers of inconvenient truths. But this tension between the infernal and the human is never developed — it remains only hinted at, as if the screenplay were afraid to truly cause harm. Where there should be ambiguity, we find only dusty allegory.
Compared to the director’s previous work (Have You Ever Been Afraid?), Invisibili retreats, taking a step back both in writing and direction. The narrative is riddled with naïveté, and an authorial fragility is often palpable, one not redeemed even by the staging. The dialogue sounds schoolish, the acting is inconsistent and at times borders on amateurish, unable to carry the weight of the words it aims to deliver.
The white butterfly, intended as a symbol of the passage between life and death, lands on every scene like an emblem that obscures rather than clarifies. It originates from a childhood memory of the director — an accidental death, the trauma of the unknown — but in the film it becomes mere spiritual ornamentation, a visual idea repeated to exhaustion, stripped of its unsettling potential.
Invisibili searches for its identity between teen drama, gothic tale, and psychological drama, but ends up fitting into none of these genres. It is a film that speaks of the need to be seen, yet fails to even see its own characters. It is said that time is all we have — but what’s missing here is the time for elaboration, for risk, for true transformation. The film wants to explore the boundary between worlds, but lacks the courage to get its hands dirty with what truly separates the living from the dead: pain without narrative, madness without form, love that does not save.
And in the end, what remains is not emotion, but a kind of emptiness. A sterile melancholy, encapsulated in a gothic wrapper that dares neither true darkness nor true light.
You do not die because you are dead. You die when you are forgotten.
— Isabel Allende
