Somnium
She’s a small town girl with a big city dream, Gemma Solomon leaving her family, her job in her parents’ diner, her aspiring but directionless musician boyfriend Hunter and her life and friends in Georgia to move to the City of Angels, walking the streets of Los Angeles with a folder of headshots and her resume and a list of talent agencies, none of whom will even speak to her when she shows up without bothering to make an appointment.
The rent overdue, she manages to find employment with the medical technology company Somnium, working the night shift as a “sleep sitter” for low wage but leaving her afternoons free for those elusive auditions, the work undemanding as she keeps an eye on the inpatients in their pods, their dreams guided by positive affirmations of their abilities and attractiveness, while Gemma finds her own broken sleep patterns are prompting disturbing hallucinations.
The feature debut of director Racheal Cain, Somnium is pitched as a science fiction thriller with aspects of horror in the strange visions experienced by Gemma (The OA’s Chloë Levine), a pale, distended creature of prominent bones and deformed skull she glimpses hiding among the sleep pods and in the darkened corridors of the facility, but any hope for relevance or profundity is hampered by the facile script which jumps gracelessly between bungled genres.
A large portion of the film given to pointless flashbacks of Gemma’s days with Hunter (Peter Vack), their summer-dappled romance is that of children in a film largely populated by such, the only adults the largely absent founder of Somnium, Doctor Katherine Shaffer (Gillian White), already planning to cut and run, and Brooks D’Arnault (Suitable Flesh’s Johnathon Schaech), the creepy guy Gemma meets in a back alley to whom she tells her insipid life story who offers to get her into castings if he will hang with her and the party girls.
Alarm bells ringing with the viewer, they are actually unwarranted as that plotline never develops other than Gemma abandoning her shift for a house party where entirely by coincidence she meets the iconic and hugely successful Max (Draya Michele) who unprompted confesses the secret that her life was turned around by a stay at Somnium, the extreme “Cloud Nine” intervention administered by Noah (Will Peltz), also creepy and apparently not a trained medical professional.
With no growth between doe-eyed Gemma in love and naïve Gemma in Hollywood, getting paid but somehow failing to pay her rent, the eviction notice another plot point raised and abandoned, with a band called Twin Peaks, static on the television and a heavy-handed soundscape of intrusive Lynchian industrial noise, it may all be a dream within a dream, but irresponsible and derelict in her duty, with evidence of patient abuse which she fails to disclose until it impacts her personally, like a trip down Mulholland Drive her deliverance and recognition be the fantasy she comforts herself with because reality is unbearable.
Somnium will be available on digital download from Monday 8th September
