‘The Days Off’ Locarno Review: An Eerie Coming-of-Age Story of Shifting Selves

After a run of short films on the international festival circuit, Lucila Mariani makes her feature debut with Los días libres, a suggestive, enigmatic coming-of-age story that tackles familiar material from an unusual angle, flirting with family drama, suspense, horror and something close to science fiction. There are echoes—at least in part—of early Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow), as well as a tonal kinship with Ingrid Pokropek’s The Major Tones. Mariani’s film follows a twelve-year-old girl over the course of a handful of summer days marked by a series of peculiar experiences.

Bego (Antonia Robolini) is imaginative and slightly insomniac, drawn to an online practice known as “shifting,” which supposedly allows people to access alternate realities, inhabit other selves and leave their bodies behind. In her room, she watches videos of people who claim to have gone through the process and listens to lessons by REN__ (Luiza Quinteiro), a young Brazilian “teacher” of this curious discipline. Running parallel to this is another strange phenomenon: an impending eclipse that seems to trigger unusual behavior in both humans and animals, leaving them frozen, staring at the sky—“eclipsed,” as the local TV puts it.

This faintly fantastical premise is grounded in something far more mundane. At school, Bego’s friends treat her with a condescension that borders on bullying, and at home her parents are facing serious financial strain. Her mother (Laura Paredes) is being offered a voluntary redundancy package at work, while her father (Guillermo Berthold) has turned to driving Uber to make ends meet. Seemingly oblivious to all this, Bego gets herself into trouble when she buys an expensive “shifting kit” online with money that isn’t hers, becoming increasingly obsessed with achieving that transition between states.

Mariani situates these elements within a recognisable adolescent framework, but what shifts is the tone—the way the narrative unfolds, the quiet, almost stealthy manner in which Bego moves through the world, her small fixations and offbeat behaviors. Through a restrained soundscape and an unhurried mise-en-scène, the film drifts toward an ambiguous, mysterious register, layering enigmas that flirt with the supernatural: dogs staring skyward, girls walking as if sleepwalking, an online “guru” urging her to pursue an out-of-body experience that will let her escape herself. Everything seems to point toward some kind of paranormal event.

Yet The Days Off resists building conventional tension around these elements. Instead, it circulates them within its own field of ideas, moving back and forth, with the eclipse functioning as something close to a narrative MacGuffin. Without stating it outright, the film speaks to the fear of growing up—of bodily change, of shifting relationships with peers and family—while its protagonist, in her muted, seemingly calm way, becomes increasingly entangled in her attempt to “shift,” to transform herself, if only briefly, into someone else—or perhaps into nothing at all. Enigmatic and understated, Mariani’s film refuses to underline its metaphors or spell out its conflicts. It observes, it registers, allowing the real world to be gradually infused with its protagonist’s singular perspective, until, at a certain point, reality and fantasy become indistinguishable.