SOMNIUM - Mark Reviews Movies

Somnium, Yellow Veil Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

A young woman from a small town arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of becoming an actor, and if that story isn't familiar enough, Somnium imagines those unlikely dreams becoming a waking nightmare. Writer/director Racheal Cain does at least provide a slightly intriguing gimmick to this clichéd tale. If the filmmaker's debut feature had taken more advantage of that conceit than some third-act weirdness, the movie might have been on to something.

Instead, the story of Gemma (Chloë Levine), who worked at her parents' all-night diner in rural Georgia until moving to California, isn't particularly engaging on its own. She shows up in the city, moves into a surprisingly spacious apartment for not having a job in a new place, and is repeatedly turned down at the offices of every talent agency she enters. There's almost certainly a degree of realism to that, because one imagines L.A. is filled with folks whose acting ambitions must have been stomped out on day one—even if it takes some of them years to realize it or, for that matter, never figure it out at all.

The real premise of this story, however, has to do with the job Gemma takes to pay the bills, which start to show up and be past-due much faster than she expects. It's at an experimental sleep clinic called Somnium, naturally, although the fact that we learn it has been in operation for almost two decades and has a steady stream of clients makes us wonder if the business has moved well past the experimental phase by this point.

Run by Dr. Shaffer (Gillian White), the company essentially makes people's dreams come true, even if it may only be while they're asleep and hooked up to a lot of equipment at the facility. The basic idea behind the system seems to be a kind of self-fulfilling wish-fulfillment, as custom dreams are made for clients to have, and after having those visions play out in their heads for a certain amount of time, the customers eventually start to believe them.

For example, someone could dream night after night of being famous, and upon waking, the boost of subliminal or subconscious confidence from those dreams, in theory, would pass on to the person's real life. Of course, we also learn that this process takes several weeks, which seems quite impractical to anyone who doesn't already live a comfortable life in the first place. It's not as if Gemma, who would be evicted from her apartment and miss out on auditions and not have a job to pay for this kind of treatment, has the time or funds to afford it in any way.

Anyway, Gemma does start making a little progress in her acting career, going to auditions, including one that she seems to nail, and coincidentally meeting the mysterious Brooks (Johnathan Schaech). He's a guy who knows a lot of people in the entertainment industry, and after running into Gemma in the back alley of a club one night, he sees something about her that makes Brooks think she might have a shot—if she allows him to help.

None of this really matters, either in terms of interest or the plot itself, which is mostly about Gemma's experiences at Somnium and how her late-night work there seems to come home with her. She has visions or vivid memories of her life back home, where she started dating grade-school crush Hunter (Peter Vack) a couple of years before moving to L.A. Their relationship is also fairly generic, as the ambitious Gemma tries to help her boyfriend, a sound technician who'd love to become a professional musician, achieve his goals. He grows to resent her for whatever reason, and now, Gemma's here.

There's also a horror element to Cain's screenplay, because the sleep-deprived and/or overwhelmed Gemma begins to see a different vision, too. It's of a creepy, gaunt figure with gray skin that has a habit of crouching or curling spindly fingers around corners. Surely, it represents something here—Gemma's diminishing mental state, some kind of sleep issue, some guilt or resentment or something else buried within her subconscious. It becomes vital to the movie's climax, as Gemma confronts her past and present in a neatly constructed and visualized sequence (The way places fold in upon themselves and into non-existence is both an eerie image and a surprisingly effective bit of visual effects).

By that point, though, the movie has also become about something else, having to do with who is using this technology and the sinister implications of those actions. If the movie has some point to make about chasing fame or losing oneself in an unlikely dream, it's unfortunately lost amidst everything. Somnium attempts to do far too much with such a thin story, unconvincing mechanics, and the constant thought that, based on the movie's central gimmick, none of this might actually matter in any real sense.

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