Stumbled across this film.. I watched it and was honestly shocked by how bad this movie is.
The director seems to have a very limited grasp of film grammar or film form. Take for instance the introductory shot of the "panelists" near the beginning of the film. The language of the tracking shot following the woman suggests a character of importance, and creates a sense of anticipation in the scene. But all we get is a nameless coffee lady delivering coffee to some panelists who we cut away from before they're even introduced. We then jarringly cut to a woman washing dishes in her house. Nothing is allowed to breathe and the viewer is left more confounded than intrigued. I see what the director is trying to do with this "non-linear" structure (a classic film student gimmick is to attempt to copy a Nolan or Tarantino-esque narrative structure), but it fails due to poor writing and poor editing.
Much of the cinematography of the film is the aesthetic equivalent of rambling. We are given so much information that is utterly useless. My only guess is that the (presumed) film student that shot this wanted to get very basic coverage without having to really think about some creative shots. This film is allegedly meant to delve into the "subconscious and the surreal" - the sort of phrase which invokes a Lynchian atmosphere. But this film is less of an Eraserhead type of surreal and more of a Birdemic brand of surreal. There is some laughable acting and writing which really detracts from the film's limited attempts to create some sort of surreal atmosphere. The score is very "film student", and frequently out of place. There is a very strange quasi-hiphop track which plays towards the end of the film which is so tonally strange that it actually cracked a smile from me. This brings me to one of the most disastrous elements of the film: the stock footage. I don't know what the thought process behind the stock footage was, perhaps its only use is its expedience for the filmmakers, but it doesn't tell us anything. Most of the time I feel like we're observing certain images just for the sake of it. It is so haphazardly cut together that it barely feels like it's part of a coherent movie.
But perhaps the worst offender of the film is the script. There is a sequence towards the end which is so poorly written that it reminded me of Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" - I can imagine a packed cinema chuckling at it. During a monologue, the central character of the film essentially declares that war is bad. Corruption is bad. We can change the world. That is it. The film ends. No, this is not a joke, this is actually the central takeaway of this film. This kind of wishy-washy wishful thinking is all we have to draw from this experience. We don't even know how lucid dreaming necessarily works and how it can help solve the worlds issues. We are left feeling empty.
Anyway, this film is not very good at all. It is a nice try by what I can only presume to be a group of first year film students behind the scenes but ultimately it falls very flat to the point of parody. I hope that the next film from these people is at least marginally better. And I also hope that they don't delete any and all criticism from online spaces to create a false image of a positive consensus!
