A beautiful, upper-class schoolteacher prepares to marry her military hero husband. But instead of saying “I Do” she declares that she cannot marry him. He rebukes her with a slap to the face. She responds in kind and knocks his head plumb off of his body. She flees the church with her white wedding gown covered in bright red blood.
This is a dream of course. Diana (Jemma Redgrave) will have many more of them before the film ends. Many, many more of them. I’d say a good 2/3rds of the film is dream sequences.
The dreams aren’t particularly scary, or even all that inventive. While watching this I kept thinking that if someone like David Lynch had directed it, Dream Demon would be a true classic. He’d create nightmares that we’d be talking about for decades. Instead, we get a lot of long hallways, a creepy basement, and the occasional man on fire.
Despite all of this I still quite liked the movie. What the dreams lack in imagination they make up for in beauty and mood. They are all shot with dramatic, shadowy lighting and wonderfully moody colors. They are…well…dreamy.
The plot outside of the dreams involves Diana trying to understand why she is having these dreams. Is she just nervous about getting married like her therapist suggests, or is there something more nefarious happening? Despite the title of the film, there isn’t anything supernatural going on, although it does owe a great debt to A Nightmare on Elm Street made just a few years earlier. But sadly, there is nothing akin to Freddy Krueger stalking her dreams. The film could really use a good villain.
There are a couple of obnoxious paparazzi types hanging around and one of them (played by the great Timothy Spall) features in some of the dreams, getting more and more grotesque with each one. But they ultimately don’t amount to much.
She’s helped by Jenny (Kathlene Wilhoite) an American who says her biological parents used to live in Jenny’s house, but she was adopted as a young girl and has no memory of them.
The two begin sharing dreams, each living inside the other’s nightmares and they begin to be afraid that they will never escape them.
Unlike a lot of movies of this sort, neither girl makes any real effort to stay awake. They don’t drink coffee by the gallon or try to remain standing or anything. Diana falls asleep a the drop of a hat. She’s constantly nodding off while sitting on the couch or anywhere else. Despite the fact she’s terrified of what she might dream of.
The resolution is as unimaginative as the dreams, and yet again I still quite enjoyed the film. There is a mood that the film is vibing on that I found to be pretty great.
themidnightcafe.org 