Chattanooga 2024 Review: SOMNIUM, Where Ambition, Exploitation, and Desperation Meet

“We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.” — Carl Jung

The Hollywood Dream Factory is anything but except for a select, arbitrary few. Per capita, the City of Angels has shattered far more dreams than it’s fulfilled, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds, if not thousands of dreamers from all parts, East, West, South, and North, from booking a one-way ticket by train, plane, or sea with Los Angeles as the only, preferred destination.

One of those dreamers, Gemma (Chloë Levine, The Sacrifice Game, King Jack), from a small town in Georgia — it’s so small she assures everyone she meets that they likely never heard of it — arrives in LA, eager to begin the first steps toward achieving Hollywood success. She’s managed to save just enough money saved for a few months' rent at most, so a get-by job (i.e., any job that pays the bills) becomes not just a priority, but an absolute necessity for Gemma.

Even getting that far money-wise, however, proves to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle for Gemma until a chance walk-by of the experimental clinic, the Somnium of the title (not to be confused as an adaptation of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s little-known, rarely read 1608 novel). At the clinic, dreams don’t exactly come true, but through a six-week sleep course, participants will obtain near superhuman self-confidence necessary to overcome any and all obstacles in pursuit of their personal desires and professional ambitions. Somnium takes the well-known, long-recognized therapeutic practice of “positive thinking” and raises it to the nth level.

And as Somnium’s newest, lowest-level employee. Gemma more or less plays babysitter, spending her nights monitoring the continuing health of the sleeping participants. She receives a tour of the facilities from the day-shift receptionist, Olivia (Clarissa Thibeaux), and the clinic’s superficially helpful, self-described “lead dream designer” Noah (Will Peltz). In short, she’s a glorified overnight security guard/night nurse. That’s more than fine, though, as it leaves Gemma’s mornings and afternoons “free” for all-important auditions.

Purposely taking more than a few surrealistic cues from David Lynch’s twin deconstructions of the Hollywood Dream Factory, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, first-time writer-director Racheal Cain drops Gemma, a stereotypical small-town girl in the big city (and everything that implies), at the intersection of ambition, exploitation, and desperation. As flashbacks to Gemma’s past in Georgia, the family diner, and the unambitious ex-boyfriend, Hunter (Peter Vack), who she left behind,crowd the frame, the boundary between Gemma’s subjective reality and the objective world begins to blur predictably.

Cain even gives Gemma an emotion-driven audition scene closely modeled after Naomi Watts’ similar scene in Mulholland Drive. To Levine’s considerable credit as an actor, she delivers a grounded, naturalistic performance, elevating the scene from mere homage or outright pastiche into a genuinely moving, poignant moment. The seemingly successful audition hangs over the remainder of the film, unanswered until well after the main through-line involving the goings on at the clinic has been resolved.

Somnium takes another ominous turn with the introduction of Brooks (Johnathon Schaech), a movie producer with dyed blonde hair dressed in expensive clothing. He initially approaches Gemma outside the clinic’s facilities. Almost immediately, Brooks offers Gemma the opportunity to meet the movers and shakers of the movie industry, an offer that appears too good to be true.

Brooks seems to represent a familiar character derived from cautionary tales about Hollywood: the all-powerful, soulless, exploitative mogul, interested in someone like Gemma not because of any talent she might have, but what he might gain materially in a lopsided bargain.

While Cain puts Levine through familiar plot curves, turns, and switchbacks, up to and including a shadowy, eerie figure who disappears almost as quickly as it appears, leaving the faintest of traces of its impact on the overall narrative or themes, nothing else in Somnium, however, challenges Levine performance-wise. Not that she doesn’t acquit herself reasonably well — she does without a doubt — only that Somnium asks of her far less than she seems capable of delivering onscreen.

Somnium premiered at the 2024 Chattanooga Film Festival. A theatrical or streaming release has yet to be set.