The PR framing is pure art-house poetry: a visionary first feature that braids horror, female identity and technology into a wistful tribute to the early internet's promise of escape.
Insiders are already whispering about whether this nostalgia bait lands with Gen Z festival-goers who never lived through dial-up forums — or if it'll read as pretentious millennial navel-gazing in Locarno's competitive lineup.
Confirmed: Argentine filmmaker Lucila Mariani makes her feature debut with 'The Days Off' (Los Días Libres), premiering at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival. The plot follows a teenager using lucid dreaming to access other realities.
This could be the festival's most talked-about debut — if it can convince audiences that mourning a dead internet is still worth their tears.
The trailer for 'The Days Off' just hit the web, and Argentine filmmaker Lucila Mariani is already making noise with her first feature. The exclusive drop via Hollywood Reporter confirms what festival insiders have been buzzing about: this is no ordinary horror movie. It's a genre-bending meditation on female identity, technology, and the ache of an internet that has quietly slipped away — all wrapped in the story of a teenager who uses lucid dreaming to punch through to other realities.
Set against the backdrop of the Locarno Film Festival premiere this August 2026, 'The Days Off' (or Los Días Libres for Spanish speakers) marks Mariani's feature debut after years of short-form work. The plot is deceptively simple: a teen discovers she can control her dreams to access alternate worlds, but those dreamscapes start bleeding into the waking world in unsettling ways. Horror purists will find their fix in the creeping dread, while art-house crowds get a layered exploration of what it means to grow up female in a hyper-connected yet isolating age.
The title itself is a wink at that era we all half-remember — those endless afternoons lost in chat rooms and forums, before algorithms flattened everything into feeds. Mariani reportedly described the film as a "love letter to that internet that no longer quite exists," per the exclusive trailer coverage. That nostalgic thread runs through every frame: the grainy textures, the CRT glow, the sense of boundless possibility that now feels like ancient history.
But here's where it gets interesting for anyone tracking festival season drama: can a story about mourning early web culture resonate with audiences who grew up on TikTok? The film is already being positioned as a breakout candidate at Locarno, but skeptics wonder if the premise is too niche. What saves it, according to early buzz in the source material, is Mariani's refusal to let the nostalgia become saccharine — she leans into horror precisely because that old internet was also weird and dark.
Expect 'The Days Off' to be one of those films people either champion as a masterpiece or dismiss as an exercise in millennial melancholy. Either way, it's got everyone talking before it even screens. The trailer alone has sparked heated debate online about whether the web we lost is worth mourning — which, honestly, might be exactly what Mariani wants.
