Waking Nightmare (2023) by Stephen Craig and Brian Farmer


Director: Stephen Craig, Brian Farmer
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural

Plot:
Suffering from debilitating sleepwalking issues, a woman trying to come to grips with it while staying at her parents' house becomes concerned when her behavior indicates the sleepwalking issues have brought her into a potential murder conspiracy and tries to find a way to stop it.

Review:

This was an overall decent genre effort. Among the better elements here is the solid setup here making for a great starting point to everything. Making a big deal about the recent series of events she has regarding her friends' death and using that as a catalyst for sleepwalking issues and nightmares that present her as a threat to herself and her family is a fine way to go about this. It's an intriguing series of storylines at play as the need to figure out the cause of these events once the ominous nature of it all gets brought up due to her constantly putting herself or others in danger through her sleepwalking antics.

Once it's been established that she's not normal and that there's something going on, the film does manage to pick up somewhat towards the finale. Featuring some gruesome scenes where her sleepwalking antics bring about several chilling sequences of her coming across others and featuring not just brutal action but some intriguing twists also emerge that keep it s one going. These twists provide the kind of setup needed to launch into the kind of gruesome kills featured here which includes a near torture-porn-style presentation how it all comes about that's quite enjoyable. These all give the film quite a lot to like for its positives.

There are some issues with this one that do hold it back. One of its main drawbacks is the avant-garde inserts designed to allegedly showcase her deranged emotional state but come off as weird for the sake of weird. From washed-out colors, acid filters, animated figures, and other bizarre imagery adorns this whenever she's in one of her episodes which is immensely unappealing, especially with the damaging soundtrack accompanying everything. The other factor with this one comes from the laid-back pacing where it takes way too long to spell out what's going on as the main faces on whether she's crazy or not so there's not much in the way of action here which keeps everything low-key until then. These are the problematic factors.


Overview: **.5/5
Somewhat off-beat and dull for what it is but still gets enjoyable enough, there are some likable factors here even if the end result does come down somewhat by the flaws here. Those who are intrigued by this kind of feature and don't mind the flaws will want to give this a shot while most others should heed caution with this one.

Comments