Heartland: Somnium

A wannabe actress takes a job at an L.A. lab where they inject people with dreams that reinforce their ambitions, and stumbles into a nightmarish mix of reality and horror.

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We’ve seen stories like “Somnium” before — where line between the waking world and a nightmarish landscape grows increasingly thin — but writer/director Racheal Cain puts a paranoid spin that makes you feel like your own anxieties are stalking you.

Cain wrote the screenplay, which won a major Los Angeles competition and also garnered notice at the Cannes festival. It’s easy to see why, with its mix of a pluckish heroine and adjacency to our growing fears about artificial intelligence blurring the line between reality and dream.

Gemma (Chloë Levine) is a girl from a small Georgia town who’s recently arrived in Los Angeles to try to make it as an actress. Everybody back home is convinced she’ll soon come slinking back, and she’s determined to show her mettle. There’s also the pain of a recent breakup with your ex-boyfriend, Hunter (Peter Vack), who had his own notions of playing in a rock band but knew in his bones he was always going to stay — and wanted her to as well.

The sweet all-American girl look doesn’t win Gemma a lot of attention at auditions, and to support herself she hunts all around for a job — any job. Desperate, she takes a gig working the night shift at Somnium, a sleep clinic that caters to the rich and famous. It’s a pretty boring job, little more than a glorified security guard, watching the monitors in case anything happens.

Dr. Katherine Shaffer (Gillian White) runs the place and created the technology that allows them to pipe visions of a person’s most desired success into their brain while they sleep. Over the course of weeks, the repetition of seeing their ambitions come true gives the subjects the confidence to go out and actually make it happen.

Later Gemma will meet Max (Draya Michele), the latest pop ingenue, and learns that she was once a Somnium client herself. She will also bump into Brooks (Johnathon Schaech), a mysterious cool guy who claims to be connected to a lot of the Hollywood power players. He offers his friendship and help to Gemma, seemingly without any strings.

Less friendly is Noah (Will Peltz) a coworker at the clinic who runs most of the software controlling the dreams. He acts indifferent to Gemma, maybe even a little hostile, but it’s clear he’s got a thing for her. Major incel vibes.

As time goes on Gemma’s own headspace becomes increasingly fragile. She experiences time slips, such as warnings from the landlord to pay her rent, when she thought she already had. Even more disturbing is a loathsome creature that begins to skitter around the edges of her own dreams, a terror of pale skin and protruding bones.

She probes more and more into the mystery of Somnium, such as a failsafe procedure known as Cloud Nine when things go really bad on a client, and hears of one, numbered 221, that had it performed on them.

Levine really holds things together as Gemma, someone we inherently like, but also worry about. Is Gemma the victim of these visions? Or participating in what’s causing them? She’s got oodles of screen presence.

Cain is a true original talent, someone with dark and compelling visions inside her head that play out in the movie — such as the blanked-out faces of people that haunt Gemma.

It’s a great-looking movie with excellent production values and special effects for a low-budget first feature. The photography by Lance Kuhns has a slightly washed-out feel, somehow both hyper-real and vague. I also appreciated the musical score from Peter Ricq, which seems to reverberate through our spines with its amelodic tones.

“Somnium” is one of those little movies that leaves a big impression.