‘Somnium’ Brooklyn Horror 2024 Review: What Really Happens When Dreams Come True
Sleeping is an essential part of our existence. But, it’s also a bodily process that remains a mystery to scientists, with its mechanisms and intricacies remaining elusive. Even though it’s something marvelous, in the truest sense of the word, sleep is so mundane that it is often taken for granted. The speculative science of Somnium (2024) imagines the power that might be harnessed during sleep to mold our minds and change our lives.
Go to sleep and dream your way to a better you, a better life. This is the promise of Somnium, an experimental clinic where patients are transformed into the people they want to be as they sleep. It is premised on an intriguing technology that combines subliminal messaging with the power of dreaming. For six weeks, clients spend their evenings inside pods where a customized program of images and audio are deposited into their minds until their subconscious believes them to be true. “We make dreams come true,” says Dr. Katherine Shaffer (Gillian White), Somnium’s founder.
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We encounter Somnium through Gemma (Chloe Levine), an aspiring actor who moves from a small town in Georgia to LA with hopes of becoming a star. After struggling to get auditions, callbacks, or any kind of job, she lucks upon a night shift job at Somnium. While the clinic’s work is fascinating, her role is fairly uninteresting, leaving her mostly alone to monitor the sleeping patients. As Gemma spends her nights watching over them, her own aspirations seem increasingly further away. She is isolated and terribly lonely, living alone and with her interactions mostly limited to her co-worker Noah (Will Peltz). By chance, she meets Brooks (Johnathon Schaech), a sleazy-seeming producer who might be a potential ally. Or just another person to take advantage of her.
Gemma’s longing for companionship is emphasized by a series of gorgeous flashback sequences where she recalls her friends and ex-boyfriend Hunter (Peter Vack) back home. Warmly lit shots capture the intimacies of daily life, such as cropped close-ups of a hand held outside a car window, snipping hair, and friends pushed around in shopping carts. These memories convey joy, fun, and a sense of belonging, a nostalgia for a former life that feels so distant while she spends her nights alone in a sterile institution.
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When Gemma begins to sense something is amiss, she is an unreliable protagonist. With Gemma isolated and sleep-deprived, we question what she sees, if anything. For instance, there are disturbances in her apartment and a feeling of being watched, as if something is lurking just out of sight. She repeatedly glimpses a monstrous figure, a tall humanoid creature with repellent slimy skin and long fingers ending in clawed nails. Is it a night terror or a manifestation of the enigmatic Somnium process? The film prompts an uncomfortable suggestion that if dreams can manifest in the physical world, we might not like what appears.
Noah, the dream designer, boasts to Gemma he can make the sleepers believe anything, like having them fall in love with her or believe she’s the next big thing. He has basically free reign over their experiences. In this way, Somnium aligns with current discussions about AI-generated content and its potential applications. The film’s thematic concerns are also grounded in the huge market for “optimization”. It’s very believable that a clinic where people could pay to improve their lives without having to do anything would be in demand. Further, its roster of successful clients—especially public figures like actors and professional athletes—would ensure a sustained clientele. However, it is not hard to imagine other, more nefarious, applications for this science.
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In her first feature film, writer and director Racheal Cain crafts a strong narrative with an empathetic protagonist. While Gemma embodies a trope, she takes a risk and commits to her plan, making an effort to maintain control over her life. She is naïve, certainly, but in a way that lends itself to the ethos of Somnium. In a city known for its toughness, for manipulating and discarding people like her, she truly believes she can make it. Like the sleepers at Somnium, she might find that the power of manifestation and self-belief is what leads to her success.
Along the same line as films such as Altered States (1980), The Cell (2000), and Come True (2021), Somnium works by leveraging our comprehension of the fantastical elements of dreams. It suggests that there are connections between physical reality and interior worlds, but, unlike these other films, such strange, exciting, and even magical experiences are not the focus. Somnium is more concerned with Gemma’s everyday life, with its all too familiar monotony and fatigue, but also its possibilities. LA might be a place many go to become new people and live big lives, but it definitely wouldn’t be the only place where an opportunity like Somnium would be popular. Somnium was altogether unexpected, compelling, and uncomfortably believable.
Summary
Somnium is altogether unexpected, compelling, and uncomfortably believable.
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