Andrômeda

Summary

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Andrômeda” follows Alice, a woman hospitalized with a severe case of the virus. When she is intubated, her experience of illness gives way to a strange, dreamlike passage between life and death. In this uncertain realm, ordinary time and physical reality no longer apply, and Alice is guided by Virgílio, a mysterious companion who leads her through a shifting landscape of hallucinations, memories, and emotional revelations. As Alice moves through fragments of her past, the film gradually connects her medical crisis to a deeper personal reckoning. Her journey is not simply an escape from the hospital or an encounter with the unknown; it becomes an inward search for identity, unfinished feelings, and the choices that shaped her life. Virgílio serves as both guide and enigmatic presence, helping Alice navigate the border between memory and imagination while prompting her to confront what she may have overlooked. At the center of “Andrômeda” is Alice’s rediscovery of cinema as a source of meaning and as a possible purpose in her life. The film uses the language of dreams and movies to explore how images can preserve experience, reshape memory, and offer a way to understand suffering. Its liminal setting also allows it to reflect on the isolation and vulnerability of the pandemic, when hospitals, screens, and memories became intertwined with ideas of connection and loss. Rather than presenting illness as a purely realistic ordeal, “Andrômeda” approaches it as a poetic, psychological odyssey. Its central themes include mortality, memory, self-discovery, the fragile boundary between reality and fantasy, and the power of art to help people make sense of existence. Through Alice’s passage into an uncertain inner world, the movie considers whether confronting the past—and returning to the stories that first inspired us—can illuminate a way forward.