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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 5.13%
Worth A Look: 26.92%
Average: 5.13%
Pretty Bad: 30.77%
Total Crap: 32.05%
7 reviews, 36 user ratings
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| In Dreams |
by MP Bartley
"Script courtesy of Donald Kaufman."
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'In Dreams' starts off with a quite startling and beautiful wordless sequence. Two divers are exploring what seems to be the wreck of a ship - until the camera pulls back to reveal that it is in fact, a submerged church. I would advise you however, to turn it off straight after this opening. The rest of the film is a sinking, terrible wreck.Instead of staying with this intriguing opening, we're thrown into the story of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening), a physic who is receiving visions of a lost child, which she believes are someone's dreams. This is a sore point with her pilot husband Paul (Aidan Quinn), but that's nothing compared to what happens when their own daughter is killed, and the visions are revealed to be dreams of the killer, who is someone known to Dr. Silverman (Stephen Rea) who is treating Claire.
Now, this film gets off on the wrong foot the instant that it kills off Claire and Paul's young daughter. Not because it's inherently wrong that a child is killed in a film - it's not, and it's actually a cheat when films place children in a position of danger, all the while never having the actual intention of really threatening them. But if a child is killed, then it only works if it's either in a film that deals with the lacerating grief that such an event can cause (Ordinary People, say), or if it's an insight into a truly evil person (History of Violence, for example).
Here, however, it's neither as In Dreams is just trashy schlock, and the child's death just leaves an extremely unpleasant taste of manipulation in the mouth. Matters aren't helped by the ludicrous script and direction. The script throws us into screaming family arguments about psychic dreams and suspected affairs, without even bothering to introduce us to the characters properly. Jordan then concludes the fall into disaster by heavily overcooking the direction. Every horror and gothic thriller cliche is thrown onto the screen here, with no trace of subtlety or invention. It's all overblown to the extreme, including a school's play that looks like it was produced on half the budget of Lord of the Rings.
Lost in this mess are the actors. Quinn and Rea are too stoic for this kind of material to give it a camp or cheerful charm, while Bening, an actress not noted for underplaying her roles, veers so far over the top that you hope the killer does catch and throttle her.
Speaking of which, even an eye-rolling, loopy performance by Robert Downey Jr can't save this mess. And this is a man who made The Shaggy Dog watchable.
And please note, that these are all criticisms that were identified within the first twenty minutes. It really doesn't get any better after that.For a better example of a film regarding someone getting uncomfortably close to a serial killer, just watch any Hannibal Lecter flick. For a better film based around a 50's pop song lyric, watch Blue Velvet instead. Hell, just watch ANYTHING else instead.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=965&reviewer=293
originally posted: 09/20/06 01:34:35
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USA
15-Jan-1999 (R)
UK
30-Apr-1999
Australia
12-Aug-1999
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