The Warning movie review: A wasted opportunity to intelligently, emotionally explore mysteries of fate

Daniel Calparsoro’s El Aviso (The Warning), the new Spanish language Netflix release, is a missed opportunity. You spend the first quarter of the film trying to like it as much as you believe you should because of its freaky, teasingly cerebral premise. The last half hour is spent keeping your gaze from wandering away from the screen in a vainglorious attempt to ignore its downfall. While it is competently mounted and there are occasional hints of an ominous atmosphere settling in, the utterly nonsensical ending only comes as a reminder of the majority of the film’s failure to live up to the potential of its premise. The Warning begins in 2008 with Jon, a 30-something mathematician, who witnesses the demise of his best friend during a freak shooting at a gas station. We soon zoom forward to 2018, where a 10-year-old boy walks into the same gas station and receives a random note warning him against coming here on his birthday. Meanwhile, Jon, who’s revealed to be mentally unstable, learns of similar incidents involving other people that happened in 1976, 1955 and 1913. Intrigued, he sets out to discover the truth behind these incidents — which he believes to be connected — using mathematics as his guide. [caption id=“attachment_4892551” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Still from El Aviso/ The Warning. Netflix[/caption] There you have the inviting plot. The first few minutes, constructed with great care and deliberation, promise a densely atmospheric unfolding that might turn out to be deliciously cerebral as well. However, it soon becomes a classic case of much ado about nothing. Calparsoro starts finding it difficult to handle the multiple storylines with elan. Jon’s mental state is often hinted at with borderline laughable hallucinations. The mathematics turns out to be disappointing at best, a mere ruse to make the film appear deceivingly credible. This litany of flaws ends up disturbing the emotional balance of the film for good. After a certain point, you lose all sense of empathy for the thinly drawn characters, half hoping for The Warning to deliver a miraculous twist to make it all worth the while. And it does, not without inducing a chuckle or two, however, and only serves to underscore the lack of imagination that slowly tears the film apart.

The performances, above all else, make you want to give the film a chance even while it manipulates its characters, and you, again and again.

While not otherworldly, they’re strong and earnest enough to keep you going. A sense of hopeless determinism pervades the film. It infects the characters too. Only, except for a couple of them, they don’t seem the least bothered by it. Little do they know that the director’s commitment to the outrageous turns of the narrative overrides his contract with the characters to the degree that they start veering away from each other, becoming more and more remote. To give him some credit, Calparsoro’s film is about the seeming rigidity of fate. How the apparent fatefulness of our lives might simply be a part of a larger, pre-determined plan, set in motion by a formative act and escape from whose clutches is impossible. Jon’s rite of passage takes him through the flames of fate even while he seeks to explain it with the comforting certainty of mathematics. He soon discovers that they’re equally crystalline. In a bid to make a dent in this granitic cosmic game, he takes recourse to sacrifice, finding himself out of options. On paper, it seems we are on an emotionally heavy ride. But the film’s shifting, wobbly focus upsets the narrative’s flow. As stated earlier, you find yourself reaching further than usual to like the film, only to be disappointed by its cowardice. In the end, The Warning tries, and not very hard, to bite off more than it could possibly chew. The performative effort is wasted on a less than ably directed film that was never short of ideas to begin with. Had the director chosen to focus on the emotional core of the story, The Warning could have made more of a discernible impact. Coupled with the film’s central theme, we would have been in for an emotional and intelligent ride through the mysteries of fate and man’s endless effort to upset the balance to his advantage.