‘NightMare’ Is More Snooze Than Scares [LFF 2022 Review]
Rory Doherty
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Dreams are a gold mine for horror. The fact that our subconscious can store our greatest or tiniest anxieties, even ones we’re not aware of, and create narratives that violate the boundaries of our stability and safety from within our own mind is one of the most fascinating aspects of human existence, made even more frightening by how little we know scientifically and conclusively about dreams. Sleep paralysis, night terrors, and lucid dreaming are such fertile grounds to explore stories of paranoia, psychological deterioration, and what shakes us to our core.
Dream sequences, however, are largely terrible in horror. Is your narrative slowed down, can you not justify introducing or revealing the terrors of the third act this early? Drop a dream sequence! You get to play around with whatever images and scares you want, with no narrative consequences for showing them to our character—because they get to wake up with nothing having occurred in real life! Plus, who doesn’t love a half-baked storyline about dreams and reality blending into one another? It’s one of the telltale signs of poorly written scary stories.
According to NightMare, the new Norwegian horror from Kjersti Helen Rasmussen, not all nightmares are over when you wake up, something that’s not true if you fall asleep during this film (unless you have to review it). Ostensibly a sincere look at the horrors of sleep paralysis, the film pretty instantly gives up on realism to tell a completely ludicrous and deeply tired riff on Rosemary’s Baby with affectations of Halloween, The Matrix, and Twin Peaks thrown in for good measure. Growing over the film’s extended 100-minute runtime (there are 60 minutes of story in here) is a strange case of genre confusion. If the film started with onscreen text explaining the real-life condition of sleep paralysis, why does NightMare concern itself with a fictional ghost story, a non-hallucinated demon, and a ludicrous dream-hopping scientific experiment?
Before we get ahead of ourselves, NightMare is about a happy, 20-something Norwegian couple who move into a ramshackle, potentially haunted apartment building, only for the unemployed Mona (Eili Harboe, star of Joachim Trier’s Thelma) to become afflicted with sleep paralysis that has her sleepwalking, mutilating herself while unconscious, and being attacked by imaginary demons that may in fact be real—much to the confusion of her partner, tech start-up hotshot Robbie (Herman Tømmeraas).
Sleep paralysis demons are one of the biggest inspirations for demons in storytelling (there’s a documentary about the condition with the same name as this film). But with all the winged beasts and black-clad Slendermen out there, it makes you question the decision to make Mona’s demon resemble Robbie, if he was a Black Lodge version of an Abercrombie & Fitch model. I do not find slicked-back hair and ripped young men terrifying, and unless you’re the plaintiff of one of A&F’s many, many lawsuits, I’m not sure many others do.
If you’re with NightMare through its clumsy imagery, cheap scares, or regurgitated plot beats (Robbie doesn’t believe Mona’s dreams, Mona doesn’t want a baby), all hope is lost by the time we meet Aksel (Dennis Storhøi), a sleep clinician with experience of the demons that lie beyond the conscious mind. As Mona is put under observation, it feels less like that MRI sequence in The Exorcist, and more like late-era Dr. Loomis, with Aksel spouting hypotheses on demonic happenings that should immediately get him disbarred from ever practicing medicine again. By the time he puts on some electrodes to jump into Mona’s dream, there is no grounded reality for us to feel compelled by. These characters have nothing to them, and there’s so little to care about.
Rasmussen has an eye for arresting visuals. There’s a hideous transformation that looks terrific on screen, as are flashes of demonic embryos. But thanks to an overly busy soundscape, NightMare has little technical flairs to commend. While I’m convinced there’s no better Norwegian actress to explore heightened, character-driven horror than Eili Harboe, NightMare is nothing to lose sleep over.
Summary
NightMare is nothing to lose sleep over.
