According to the postscript of writer/director Michel Franco's debut feature, Daniel & Ana, the film exists to portray the very real problem of kidnapping in Mexico. However, due to a rather questionable stylistic choice in portraying the trauma that drives the story, some may question whether Franco has wandered into exploitation territory. Assuming that Franco's motives are indeed genuine, it's difficult to determine why he would choose this particular true story to expose such a prominent social topic over the hundreds of others since he doesn't seem nearly as interested in exploring his protagonists' damaged psyches as he does in presenting their harrowing violation in lurid detail.
Siblings Daniel (Dario Yazbek Bernal) and Ana Torres (Marimar Vega) hail from a well-to-do Mexican family. Ana is in the midst of planning her wedding to handsome young professional Rafa (José Maria Torre) when she and her brother are methodically kidnapped by a pair of thugs, who hijack their car and reveal that they're well aware of their victims' identities. Blindfolded and driven to an undisclosed location, the pair are quickly led to a small room with a bed, and threatened with rape and murder should they refuse their kidnapper's demands to have sex on camera. Reluctantly, Daniel and Ana submit, and afterward they are released as promised. Yet, despite the fact that the siblings bear no physical scars from their trauma, the psychic wounds that have been inflicted upon Daniel and Ana will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Over the course of the next few weeks, a bedridden Ana attempts to decide whether she should call off the wedding, while Daniel continually ditches school, wandering aimlessly through the streets with a blank stare. Later, Ana speaks anonymously with a psychologist, and encourages her brother to join them in a group session. But while Ana is summoning all of her strength to scale her black pit of despair, her brother only seems to sink deeper into the abyss with each passing day.
The main problem with Daniel & Ana isn't the vague air of exploitation that hangs over the film's excruciating centerpiece but the fact that, as a screenwriter, Franco seems completely disinterested in externalizing his characters' inner struggle in a way that would be compelling to moviegoers. In the aftermath of Daniel and Ana's horrifying experience, all Franco gives them to do for approximately 30 minutes is stare dejectedly into space -- at the table, at school, in bed, and on the street -- offering nothing but single-syllable, monotone answers to any inquiries about what's bothering them. One can only assume that they're being consumed by shame since the dialogue is so sparse from the moment of the kidnapping onward, but even when Ana visits a psychologist to purge her emotions, the screenwriter dashes any hope of a thoughtful, reflective discourse concerning the events by abruptly starting the scene just as Ana finishes spilling her guts.
By the time Daniel snaps, the story has simply lost too much momentum to recover, and though the director makes a feeble attempt at creating suspense in the final few scenes, by then it just feels like a wasted opportunity. While the performances are adequate all around -- Bernal and Vega are a convincing pair of siblings and Torre does the most he can with a role of limited substance -- Daniel & Ana is such a detached, emotionless film that it never really amounts to much. By offering zero insight into the kidnapper's motivations and bumbling any half-hearted attempts to show the lingering repercussions on the victims, Daniel & Ana amounts to little more than a dry, passionless account of a horrific crime.
