Nightmare
To Robbie it seems a good deal, an apartment which is on the market at a price below what would be expected because the previous tenant died on the premises, her belongings still littering the halls; to Mona it is less of a bargain, bearing the burden of renovation which was agreed to be shared between them before Robbie’s work took precedence, peeling back aging wallpaper like layers of history and sanding the floorboards.
Stressed and sleep deprived, tortured by the endless crying of their neighbours’ baby and able to hear every word of their arguments through the paper-thin walls, Mona begins to suffer from terrifying nightmares, each taking a different form but with a recurring figure, a black shape who resembles Robbie but isn’t, lunging for her, pinning her down, never sure from where it will next appear, lurking in the shadows or creeping up from under the bedcovers.
Starring The Wave‘s Eili Harboe as Mona, no longer able to tell whether she is awake or asleep and Leave‘s Herman Tømmeraas as Robbie, unsympathetic and focused only on his obligations at work which leave Mona alone each day with her dark thoughts, isolated and frustrated, Nightmare (Marerittet) is written and directed by Kjersti Helen Rasmussen, built around the phenomenon of sleep paralysis which leaves Mona caught between dream and reality.
Conveniently introduced to the work of Doctor Aksel Bruun (Dennis Storhøi) of the Somnia Clinic by a friend for no other reason than to move the plot forwards, a consultation brings a radical diagnosis, informing Mona that her experiences match the classic description of the Mare, a nightmare demon of Nordic and Germanic folklore; agreeing to experiment with lucid dreaming to take control of her subconscious, the doctor monitors her progress, able to see into her dreams via a specialised brain scanning headpiece he has developed.
A hodgepodge of ideas from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Rosemary’s Baby via Brainstorm, where Nightmare starts to come adrift is in Mona’s easy acceptance of Doctor Bruun’s unorthodox theories without question, a narrative expedience as unconvincing as Robbie opening a single filing cabinet in Bruun’s office and immediately finding files which confirm the doctor previously treated the now deceased former tenant and also their neighbour whose suicide prompts police attendance but no followup.
A film of shifting visions of distorted sound and dislocated visuals which blurs what is real and what is imagined, where Nightmare should become disturbing, the viewer pulled into Mona’s inescapable horror and no longer able to trust anything they see, the opposite is true, the endless jump scares signifying that another scene was in fact a nightmare all along dulling any sharp edges so the film becomes an undifferentiated continuum which takes too long to resolve itself in a supposed shock ending telegraphed in the opening scenes.
Nightmare will be available on Shudder from Friday 29th September
