Director: Racheal Cain
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
After arriving in Los Angeles, a struggling wannabe-actress takes a job working in an experimental dream-study clinic to make ends meet, where she learns the lead doctor can control a person’s dreams with some severe side effects, eventually bringing her into the dark world itself.
Review:
This was an okay enough feature with some likable factors. Among the better elements found here is the intriguing setup that provides an intriguing setup for how and why she gets dragged into the mess she eventually does. The idea of the small-town girl trying to make her dreams come true in a cold, uncaring world of film auditions and sketchy producers trying to prey on women like that, which eventually drags over into her last-ditch job to stay there while working at the dream study facility, makes everything here come together for the right amount of sympathy present. As we get to see how she gets dragged down by the weight of everything around her and what the actual purpose of the study is all about, her spiral into madness feels far more logical when the hallucinations start occurring, as that all leads into a series of impressive visuals and ideas within her.
Beyond that, though, there’s just not a whole lot to this one that makes for an enjoyable time. This is mostly down to the absolutely dreadful pacing that tries to make this one feel like a slow-burning, immense, building dread, but instead makes for a sleep-inducing drag to get through. The mere fact that hardly anything overtly genre-related happens for nearly an hour into this as we wander around with her trying to make a career in the industry but getting nowhere, her failed love-life, meeting up with the dream clinic and their staff, and the haunting coldness of her personal life making everything around her feel more isolating than anything, it means that very little is happening to engage the viewer. It’s almost as if this feels more at home in a short stretched out to feature length with all the excessive material added to this one to try to justify getting it up to a feature-length running time, and all told, these end up lowering this one.
Overview: **/5
A watchable at best genre effort that has some big issues, this one is an intriguing enough effort that comes together well enough for what it is, although those flaws are quite prominent in this one. Those with an appreciation or interest in the subject matter or who are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like here, while everyone else should heed caution with this one.
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