Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Ross II
Starring: Jasmine Mathews, RJ Brown, Sally Stewart, Stephen Barrington, Danny Brown
Writer/director James Ross II's feature debut Parasomnia isn't the first horror movie to deal with sleep disorders. Hell, it's not even the first film named Parasomnia. Any horror flick that features a demonic entity crossing over from the realm of dreams into the real world is setting itself up for unfavourable comparisons to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Parasomnia doesn't have an iconic villain on the level of Freddy, but it does enough to distance itself from Wes Craven's creation by establishing a lore of its own, one that feels fresh and well considered.
The story is centred on Riley (Jasmine Mathews). When she was five, Riley's father killed her mother before taking his own life. A decade later, a similar murder-suicide occurred at the foster home where she was then residing. Having slept through both incidents, Riley has convinced herself that the creepy figure she sees in her dreams (Simon Longnight) is somehow responsible for the bloodshed.
Now aged 25, Riley has moved back into her late parents' home with her new boyfriend Cam (RJ Brown). A surprise birthday party reunites Riley with David (Stephen Barrington), a fellow resident of the aforementioned foster home. Riley is happy to catch up with David, but she is apprehensive about having people stay in her home for fear of a repeat of the violence that has plagued her past. When David and his girlfriend (Danny Brown) disappear in the middle of the night, Riley fears history is repeating.
Ross II has given much thought to the lore of his film, and he manages to spell it out without getting bogged down in too much exposition. The shtick here is that every 10 years the mystery figure from Riley's dreams (known as "The Seer") emerges to claim another set of victims. A grisly touch sees his targets eat the eyes of their victims before plucking out their own, offering their eyes to the Seer. Anyone who is unlucky enough to be awake in the immediate vicinity of the sleeping Riley is a potential victim. Ross II injects elements of Voodoo, and the African-American filmmaker handles the subject with less trepidation than you might expect from a white counterpart.
As a director Ross II displays a knack for generating unease with shadowy, half-glimpsed figures. He wisely keeps the Seer in the background until late on, aware that the sight of a tail disappearing behind a couch can often prove more unsettling than being confronted with the full rat. There is one great sequence in which a character is unsure if the figure he's seeing in the distance is real or a side effect of his spliff, and the Seer's sudden appearance will likely lead to much popcorn spillage.
As a writer, the debutant is similarly confident, structuring his film in a novelistic way that pauses halfway through to take us back to a year earlier, upending every assumption we've made to that point.
He's blessed with a small but talented cast too, with Mathews especially affecting as the tortured Riley. It's nice to see the dreaded T-word, "trauma", integrated organically into a horror movie's plot rather than used as a cheap way of giving a character some backstory. Riley's trauma is directly related to everything that's happening around her, not some unrelated childhood incident. In one early scene Ross II makes his characters likeable and relatable, which helps add to the sense of dread and tragedy that later emerges.
I'm not sure the Seer is novel enough a villain to spawn a franchise, but this is a rare horror movie where the victim is more interesting than the villain. I'll be keeping an eye out (hehe) for Ross II's future work.
