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.
Parasomnia is on Shudder from
September 4th.
