
Showcasing at the Chattanooga Film Festival for the very first time, Somnium, formerly known as Alaska, is the first feature film of writer and director Racheal Cain whose previous works include Everything Beautiful, The Clancy Family Funeral Home, and Roaddog. It is a film that explores visions, lucid and not; it depicts the life of Gemma (Chloë Levine, The Sacrifice Game, The Transfiguration) who after breaking up with her boyfriend, decides to move to LA to start her path to fame and fortune since she believes she can make it in Hollywood.
However, as we know from the subsequent montage after her arrival, that kind of aspiration and ambition requires more than wishing on a shooting star. Picking up night shifts at Somnium, a sleep research facility where she works as a sleep sitter, Gemma has to earn a check and see to the needs of her patients. It’s not glamorous, it pays poorly, nevertheless, it’s work and it helps her with her auditions in the afternoons.
Gemma’s co-worker Noah, played by Will Peltz, the dream designer of the company himself reveals to her that there was a doctor of sports science Dr. Katherine Shaffer, played by Gillian White, who assisted in setting it up so that it was based on her program The Science of Winning. To put it simply, it uses reprogramming of a persons mind while they sleep in order to accomplish the objective. This leads to his responsibility of crafting the dreams that they are expected to have.
This is an enthralling and unsettling concept; tampering with a person’s personality through state-of-the-art dreams. More bizarre than any of this is what is occurs in one of the rooms and Gemma thinks she witnesses one night. There is also a mention of a peculiar operation called Cloud 9 which is said to be quite drastic and only done when a patient is at the end of their rope due to a procedure that instead of making them confident drives them crazy.
An element that Cain garners from this also is that Gemma’s own dreams are embedded in this. They are gnawing life together with her more than loving former boyfriend Hunter, played by Peter Vack, and a bunch of memories of their shared life in an unknown tiny town. This is a very different environment from Los Angeles and Brooks, played by Johnathon Schaech, who seems to be a love interest.
And, even though it took her six years, the flashback scenes were filmed in 2018, Cain has definitely created a picture that is, at times, terrifying. And in that Gemma has to overcome her fears in the creepy last act that recalls parts of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Come True, and a couple of other films before coming to an intentionally inconclusive ending which can be read in one of many ways.
In addition, Cain was the production designer for the film. Erica Kelsey, Laurie Brenner, and Wendy O’Brien casting were the star-studded cast. Lacuna with a captivating design. Simultaneously the Director of Photography Lance Kuhns (Samantha Rose, Long Gone By) and Set Decorator Claire Kirk (John Bronco Rides Again) create an atmospheric stage for the cast to perform on. The clinic has a really terrifying ultra-modern feel, the comforting light of the sleep chambers once again gives way to vast empty dark passages, and the dilapidated block of flats in which Gemma resides looks as though it is a spot with ghosts and in fact a murderous maniac could be living there.
Although they are top-billed, Grace Van Dien (V for Vengeance, Awaken the Shadowman) and Johnathon Schaech are not that much seen on screen but they do perform perfectly in their parts. It is Levine who elevates the picture and does so effectively, depicting an individual who is on the verge of losing self-belief on her way to realizing her goals. Peltz comes across as rather dull in a character that had a lot to offer in regard to Noah’s character and even his career, only for him to be poorly developed.
Racheal Cain has presented a promising feature debut with Somnium. One that reconciles a drama on how much we are ready to pay for our dreams with medical horrors while showing us that the most terrible beasts are, in fact, the people.
For more movies like Somnium visit 123movies