The Reel Review
After an aspiring actress new to Los Angeles takes a job at an experimental sleep center that promises to make its customers’ desires come true, she quickly discovers that the lines are becoming blurred between her own reality and what seems like hallucinations, confusion and paranoia. Chloë Levine, Will Peltz and Jonathon Schaech star in this psychological horror/thriller.
In her film debut, writer/director Racheal Cain swings for the fences with a trippy, wildly ambitious fever dream of a tale that unfortunately, while cool on paper, more often than not, misses the mark as a film. Levine (The Ranger, The OA) does a fine job as the lonely, troubled ingenue, but the muddled, derivative story is cluttered with a distracting laundry list of pop culture references from such films as The Substance, Altered States, Mulholland Drive and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Schaech (Hush, That Thing That You Do!), however, is quite convincing as her creepy, bleached-blond acquaintance.
The presence of a lanky humanoid creature, while unsettling, does nothing to advance the story. (Why is it there?) In sum, Somnium is a cool concept turned into a very mediocre film frustratingly reminiscent of the initially promising but ultimately disappointing 2021 sleep sci-fi/horror Come True.
REEL FACTS
• FSU film school graduate Racheal Cain won 1st place in the Los Angeles Screenplay Competition for Somnium. She lives in Austin, Texas.
• Jonathon Schaech claimed in a 2018 People magazine article that Italian director Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet, The Champ, Endless Love) sexually assaulted him during the filming of 1993’s Sparrow, with the resulting trauma leading to years-long addictions to sex, drugs and alcohol. After a six-year marriage to actress Christina Applegate and a one-month marriage to singer Jana Kramer, Schaech married publicist Julie Solomon in 2013. They have two children.
• Somnium was filmed in Los Angeles and the Georgia cities of Savannah and Watkinsville.
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