If you’re on the grind and trying to make your dreams come true, can you really afford not to make the most productive use of your sleep? Experimental sleep clinic Somnium offers subjects the chance to make their dreams real by radically transforming their approach and personality. Aspiring actor Gemma (Chloë Levine) is thrilled to get a job at the centre but soon discovers that all is not what it seems.
Somnium is not the first film to explore the dark side of Hollywood through a horror lens, and the film does have much in common with films like Starry Eyes and The Neon Demon. But as a stylistically and narratively ambitious exploration of the “Woman in trouble in Hollywood” sub-genre the film occasionally invokes the eerie nightmares of Lynch himself. Gemma’s demons are both personal and societal and as reality begins to slip it’s as unclear to us the viewer as it is to Gemma herself whether her problems are from within or without.
Some specifics of the plot, such as the exact operations of Somnium and what it’s clients hope to gain from it, remain vague but only insofar as benefits the robust metaphor at the heart of it’s story. The clinic offers whatever it’s clients need to feel as though the dream is alive and possible and what it gains from them in return is left to the imagination. At the heart of the piece is Levine’s immensely sympathetic performance as Gemma. She beautifully captures the vulnerability of a hopeful on the first rung of a slippery ladder.
Racheal Cain’s stylish and imaginative film walks confidently in the footsteps of similar genre films that came before, but offers a tantalising view of a writer-director with great potential.
Four Stars