User Reviews

Agnosia has a great premise, and interesting characters. The lead in is captivating-seeing how JoAna developed her disability. The imagery with the black balloons in the air, her coughing and fainting, and her father fighting over the guns and then rushing over to help her, were all beautiful. The cinematography was excellent. As the film develops, you can see how her father and her fiancée care and are devoted to her, although both in different ways. Another merit was the visual effects used to portray what JoAna sees. It's very glassy, simple, and effective. Her part was very well acted and enjoyable, as well as all the other characters.

A little after the middle of the film, however, things start to get confused and the result is disappointing. The story had started out with this conspiracy to gather a secret family formula from JoAna's father (which hooks you in), but their method is a bit weak (like a Shakespearean meta-comedy, but instead of switching bodies, they switch the room... an interesting idea, but could have been done better I think). The worst part however, is that the servant the conspirators hire to pretend to be JoAna's fiancée, having fallen in love with her, makes a sexual pass at her. She consents, believing him to be her fiancée, and falls in love with him. The story changed from a thriller, to some kind of confused love story.

The love triangle is meant to be dramatic, but it doesn't work. You don't sympathize for Vincent, the servant, because he took advantage of JoAna's disability, and that is actually rape. You don't relate to JoAna's desire for Vincent in contrast to her affection of Carles, her Fiancée, because even though any woman in her situation may have fallen for Vincent, she still would detest him for taking advantage of her weakness. And you can't sympathize for Carles either, because he acted as if this was an attack on himself, and not on JoAna. The movie ends with JoAna dying, and Carles helping up a shot down Vincent (her rapist and the whole reason she is dying) and both crying over her body. (I find this laughable, not dramatic. The last thing I would do if my fiancée's rapist, who she was in love with, came back and caused her to die out of his own carelessness, is to allow him the satisfaction of seeing her last few moments.)

The actual introduced story of the conspiracy goes unresolved, insinuating strongly that the main antagonist got away with it- not only getting away with it, but doing so without much of a problem. This is how the movie really falls flat. Why totally abandon the interesting first story for a very weak second story involving some misguided love triangle no one could really sympathize with?

We've got a major case of misleading marketing here, folks. The DVD box for "Agnosia" makes this look like a Spanish thriller in the vein of "The Orphanage" or "Julia's Eyes", and goes out of its way to hide the fact that it is actually set in the turn of the (19th to 20th) century. But even the trailer itself tries to sell this as a thriller. What you get, instead, is a plodding, melodramatic period soap opera with some industrial espionage mixed in. Although well-produced, well-acted and professionally put together, it is so far from the expectations it sets for itself that it is bound to disappoint anyone looking for a thriller. If you see it with the right expectations, you might enjoy parts of it. ** out of 4.