Calgary Underground 2025 Review: REVERIES: THE MIND PRISON, One Story Ends, Another Story Must Begin
You know that dream where you are running, to nowhere in particular, for no reason, and you trip, fall, and wake up? Reveries: The Mind Prison is the movie version of that dream. Only here, you are walking, and thus do not trip, and are unable to wake up. You merely float along in absurd profundity of the in between.
Comedians and filmmakers Anthony Oberbeck (Dad & Step-Dad), Matt Barats (Cash Cow) and Graham Mason (Inspector Ike) have been making these Reveries collaborations and putting them online for nearly a decade. They are fanciful and impractical mid-length films, where note-book ephemera and orphaned stand up comedy bits have been set to psychedelic visuals, interstitial bits, and deadpan camcorder shots of liminal urban spaces and National parks captured while on the road across North America.
Reveries: The Mind Prison is the more refined and more ambitious (but still very much committed to a certain low-rez DIY freeform unpolishedness) feature film version. Their Carnival of the Mind. Their Orgy of Abundance. Their Cadence of Incredulous. It is just the kind of Lo-Fi goofery that one hopes to stumble into at midnight at a film festival, or on the television in the chill-out room at a house party.
Two drifters. Wearing sunglasses. Walking in slow motion. No destination. They observe. They pontificate in their minds, in dualling (duelling?) harmonies. They drive a car in the sky. They drop acid, because of course they do.
However, at some point, the film slowly evolves out of the content of the previous Reveries entries, and even the early chapters of The Mind Prison, and into something more primal, more personal. As if the filmmakers are trying to dare the nonsense to get almost...serious.
