Film byJonathan Romney
Neil Jordan's idea of dream might not be quite the same as Steven Spielberg's. The logo for DreamWorks Pictures, for whom Jordan has made his latest film, shows a clean-cut young lad perched in a crescent moon, dabbling his fishing rod in iridescent blue waters. The tone of Jordan's In Dreams is more suggestive of a psychoanalyst poking around with a stick in the Freudian murk. That may be one reason why the film has been so derided by American critics. Another, alas, is that far from making genuinely dream-like sense, it fails to make much sense at all.
In Dreams begins promisingly, deep in a flagrant representation of the unconscious - a small American town that has been flooded and now lies at the bottom of a reservoir. We see water burst though windows in explosion after explosion, until at last divers pick their way through a blue inland Atlantis, floating through a churchyard creeping with eels.
That's more than enough expensively mounted metaphor for any film to be getting on with, but it's just the start. The children's illustrator Claire (Annette Bening) suffers from nightmares that - as presented through digital image manipulation - seem to leap out of her mind like unfolded sheets, and reveal to her the murders of local children. One day, her own daughter is killed. First grief, then madness, send Claire off the edge of narrative coherence and into an equivocal dream zone where she wages war on the killer (Robert Downey Jr). He is her personal bogeyman, and at the same time a regular dysfunctional guy, scarred by parental abuse. It's her job at once to defeat him and to mother him - to heal his pain, if you must. Despite Jordan at the helm - with Bruce Robinson as co-writer - this is in many ways a deeply Californian therapy tale.
Jordan has drawn on dream imagery in much of his best work, from The Company of Wolves (1984) to last year's The Butcher Boy. But where those films derived their oneiric vocabularies from fairy tales and Irish Catholic anxiety respectively, In Dreams delves into a particular strand of nightmare - into recent cinema's own unconscious. Its repertoire of images is at first unsettling, because so uncannily familiar; yet the effect wears off as the film becomes quite saturated with it. Obsessively reworking well-known horror riffs, In Dreams projects itself as a grand inventory of themes and images from, among others, The Shining (apple pulp exploding from a sink like blood from the lift in Kubrick's film), Psycho (the traumatised kid who's also his own murderous mother) and The Silence of the Lambs (killer and female detective discover an empathetic bond). Above all, In Dreams echoes the Nightmare on Elm Street series, with sleep as the arena in which heroine battles predator in a psychic mano a mano. Let's not forget David Lynch - Roy Orbison's title song was also featured in Blue Velvet, that key story of nastiness thinly veiled under domestic surfaces.
So what if Jordan's film is over-familiar? After all, contemporary mainstream horror is entirely built on recycling - notably in self-congratulatory genre-savvy teen entertainments like Scream and The Faculty. But Jordan aims higher, so fails all the more painfully. For a start, the film presents itself as anything but straight genre; it's about adults, not impressionable kids, and sets out to dramatise real traumas. Annette Bening presents Claire from the outset as a complex, angry character, far richer in self-destructive contradictions than the plucky, slasher-defying co-eds we're used to. So when the nightmares set in, and reality and dream become definitively intermingled (in no small part, thanks to Darius Khondji's diaphanously grainy photography), the film aims to restore a full imaginative, emotive charge to the old vocabulary - to turn commonplaces into archetypes. But with less and less to anchor it in a recognisable reality, In Dreams loses itself in a pile-up of imagery and grand emotional gesture - the worst of which comes in Downey's frenetic performance.
Another of this week's releases attempts similar intermingling of dream and reality- David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which passes through several complex levels of hallucination, via the narrative premise of a virtual-reality game. Here, dream seems both more trivial than in Jordan's film (it is all a game, after all) and at the same time a matter of more cutting import for the viewer. In eXistenZ, the central question is one of consent - the viewer's own willingness to buy into the illusion, in the full commercial sense of the phrase, for the eXistenZ game has a corporate owner. As always with Cronenberg, there's a moral question at stake.
Jordan's film is considerably more naive. When the floodgates of dream imagery open, it proposes, you might as well let the waves wash over you - share Claire's experience, swim in the element of madness. But in trying too hard to immerse us in its romantic vision, In Dreams feels coercive, and we simply distance ourselves from it. We're all the more inclined to yield to the more structured dream of eXistenZ, knowing that we're being dared to resist.
"In Dreams" (18) runs at selected cinemas
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