22. Parasomnia (2008, Malone)
By Eivind Langdal
16th November 2009

Deep inside Parasomnia, there is a good film waiting to get out. Sadly, it’s buried beneath layers of bad acting, crappy special effects and direction so atrocious you might as call it misdirection. The ideas in this film belong to a better film. No, scratch that, they deserve to be in a better film. I don’t think I hate Parasomnia as much as I pity it, because there is potential here. Perhaps the film could have been great, but from where it stands now, there’s a long walk to that place.

Parasomnia is a condition that’ll make you spend most of your life sleeping (and that’s not a metaphor). How appropriate then that the film suffers from a condition of its own: multiple identity disorder. It’s a mishmash of a lot of things, switching between moods, genres and varying levels of quality without any sense of purpose. One part of the film wants to be a twisted version of “Sleeping Beauty”; another is content to be a turkey. Watching the film is like driving on a really curvy road, as it never stays on path long enough for the audience to get comfortable. If the intention was to throw the audience off-balance by switching genres and moods at a frequent rate, that intention is a failure. After all, if you want to throw someone off balance, shouldn’t they be balanced first? You can’t push a guy down the top of a cliff if he’s still climbing.

Like Hannibal Lecter, the film’s villain, serial killer Byron Volpe, is a character whose introduction is based around the amount of restraints that keeps him from the free world. Strange then, that he resides in a public hospital where you can peek into his padded cell through a regular window (you don’t even have to use the elevator to get down to the basement; his room is right next to the hallway). I think the movie provided some kind of explanation to this, though it wasn’t logical enough for me to remember it, or, for that matter, accept it. He is a disturbing presence, I’ll give him that, but the more disturbing he is, the less easy it is for the audience to accept that he is so loosely restrained.

Volpe is discovered by the film’s hero, a record-collecting young man named Danny, who is passionless and hard to figure out (he acts on the behalf of the plot, not logic). He meets Volpe by accident when he visits his drug-addicted friend Billy in a hospital. In addition to telling Danny about Volpe, Billy also introduces him to another patient, named Laura, who suffers from the titular parasomnia. Despite having gained her condition in a very brutal car accident, she looks like an angel (or alternatively, a model for a fashion product). She is exactly as interesting as you’d think a character that spends most of the film sleeping would be. In that sense, she is the film in a nutshell. Everyone involved in making the film seems to have the same condition.

Danny falls in love with Laura immediately, and when he learns that a group of doctors is going to use her for a study that apparently have already killed one patient, he kidnaps her and takes her to his apartment. Unfortunately for the both of them, Volpe, who is a brilliant hypnotist, has already possessed Laura, and now haunts her in her dreams. His plan? To convince her that Danny is her enemy and that he himself is her true lover. Maybe she would have believed that if it weren’t for the fact that the dream sequences are so shoddily made that they made me wonder if they were drawn in Paint. Okay, so maybe that is a cruel thing to say, as it isn’t exactly true, but if you want to be blown away by special effects, let this be a warning: do not see Parasomnia.

Don’t see Parasomnia if you expect a masterpiece either. As a positive note, I will say that the movie is never conventional. It genuinely tries to be something else, and I applaud its effort. But this doesn’t hide the fact that this film is bad no matter how great its ideas are (and they’re never really that great either). Don’t think bringing a shovel to the film in an attempt to dig out its greatness will work. That greatness is hidden by concrete, and it will take more than a shovel to get past that.