Spooky Slumber
Main Cast: Annette Bening, Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, Robert Downey, Jr.
Director: Neil Jordan
**This Review Contains Major Spoilers**
Plot Summary: A mother, troubled by disturbing dreams, is cast into a waking nightmare when her visions seem to be coming to life. Her family shattered, she attempts to find out who is torturing her sleep and try to stop him from killing again.
This is quite a silly thing indeed, despite its dark undertones and grim finale. I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy into the logic of the movie, which is fatal to believability. But not quite enjoyment, because I laughed not a few times, although I’m sure the situations weren’t meant to be funny.
Anyway. Annette Bening plays Claire Cooper, a slightly neurotic housewife. She has strange dreams, fragments of pictures and people, which don’t seem to make sense. At least at first. But when her daughter is snatched away and killed she figures out the dreams are part prophecy, part real memories of someone else. Apparently she has been connected up to the mind of a serial killer. Of course the males around her don’t believe her, but to be fair she is more than a little melodramatic and hard to take seriously. Only drugged and reeling is she in any way believable, which tells you something.
Claire sees the killer and tries to warn everyone, but her hysterics only land her in the looney bin. No problem: her dreams (well, the dreams of the killer) lead her out – but not before a very bizarre episode with her dog. Can the killer control his mind, too? It seemed that way.
She finally ends up meeting the killer, who had a very bad childhood. Apparently he grew up in the flooded town under the new reservoir, which figures prominently in a few dreams. It’s a pretty neat trick (abandoned buildings under water) and good visuals, but leads nowhere. They could have made use of it more. The killer using it to stash bodies, or even his home. But no. Nothing as exciting as that.
I can’t really recommend this one. While somewhat amusing (Ms. Bening’s overacting is a plus: I haven’t seen her in anything else and I hope she is much better), that doesn’t save it enough. I suggest you find something else to do with your time. Maybe take a nap?
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
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