Taglines: You don’t have to sleep to dream.
In Dreams movie storyline. The housewife Claire Cooper is married with the pilot Paul Cooper and their little daughter Rebecca is their pride and joy. When a stranger kidnaps a girl, Claire dreams about the man but Detective Jack Kay ignores her concerns. But when Rebecca disappears during a school play, Claire learns that her visions were actually premonitions and she is connected to the killer through her dreams.
She has a nervous breakdown and tries to commit suicide. Her psychologist Dr. Silverman sends her to a mental institution and soon she finds that her husband will be the next victim of the serial-killer. Further, the serial-killer was interned in the same cell in the hospital where she is. Will Claire be able to save Paul?
In Dreams is a 1999 American psychological thriller film directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Annette Bening as a New England illustrator who begins experiencing visions of a missing child who turns out to be her own daughter; through her dreams, she begins having psychic connections to a serial killer responsible for the murder of her daughter and several other local children.
Film Review for In Dreams
At heart ”In Dreams” is just a campfire story, and a pretty loony one at that. But Neil Jordan has directed it furiously, with a lush, insinuating visual style that gets right under the skin.
No stranger to tales of intertwined identities and dark secrets, Mr. Jordan, the director of ”The Crying Game,” ”Interview With the Vampire” and last year’s stunning ”Butcher Boy,” gives his latest film a feverish intensity that often eclipses its shrill, groaningly far-fetched side. Working with the audacious cinematographer Darius Khondji, Mr. Jordan stirs up a nightmare brooding and intuitive enough to recall the richly textured mysteries of Nicolas Roeg’s ”Don’t Look Now.”
Plot synopsis will not be kind, but here goes: Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) is an artist, mother and illustrator plagued by terrifying psychic visions. Like Denzel Washington in ”Fallen” (or Faye Dunaway in ”The Eyes of Laura Mars” or plenty of others), she is being tormented by somebody else’s thoughts. This time it’s a serial murderer of little girls who is doing the haunting, in a setting that’s all too conducive for such spooky tricks. Claire lives near a New England reservoir that covers the remains of ”a drowned ghost town.” (If anything looks familiar, that’s because a vast underwater set was built in the same Mexican tank that housed sunken-ship scenery for ”Titanic.”)
Nobody takes Claire seriously, not even her husband, an airline pilot played by Aidan Quinn. Nobody cares when she claims psychic knowledge about the drowning of one young victim. But then the Coopers’ own daughter is abducted — out of an ingeniously creepy grade-school staging of ”Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” performed by night in a forest — and Claire seems to go berserk. The film works best when it balances between the external view of Claire and the Claire who thinks sinister piles of red, red apples are plotting against her.
It turns out Claire was right, of course. In Bruce Robinson’s screenplay, she is channeling the thoughts of a man traumatized when the reservoir flooded the town, and apples actually are part of the problem.
For Mr. Jordan, this means turning the film ever trippier, throwing in everything plus the kitchen sink, which vomits brown mush at one overwrought moment, to simulate his heroine’s ordeal. The film reaches a pinnacle of the bizarre when Claire and the killer seem to meld during a violent escape from a mental hospital, after which the killer’s ”Silence of the Lambs”-style lair — an art director’s fever dream — is finally revealed.
These may sound like dreams born of eating pepperoni pizza while watching ”The X-Files,” but ”In Dreams” manages to make them genuinely strange. The production is elaborate, especially in its underwater sequences, and Mr. Khondji’s cinematography often seems to lend scenes an extra dimension.
The camera may swoop vertically when least expected to, or hint at a second world that mysteriously co-exists with the main action. (While the main characters are seen in a long, gleaming corridor at a police station, the eye is simultaneously drawn to goings-on far behind them.) The film’s insistent symbolism, dramatic costumes (by Jeffrey Kurland) and experimental use of color, sometimes eerily bold and sometimes deliberately faded, also keeps things sufficiently weird.
Though Ms. Bening’s role calls for her to be alternately somnambulant and hysterical, she gives it fervent energy and never camps up the horror, even when all those apples would have made it easy. Mr. Quinn has less to do in a role that treats him as the dog’s breakfast in more ways than one.
Robert Downey Jr., who arrives most frighteningly, late in the film, puts in the appearance most likely to make spines tingle. In a chilling, deceptively casual-looking performance, this brave and ever-astonishing actor courts the ridiculous even as he makes the story’s craziest dreams come true.
”In Dreams” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity, sexual situations and several grisly fantasies.
In Dreams (1999)
Directed by: Neil Jordan
Starring: Annette Bening, Robert Downey Jr., Katie Sagona, Aidan Quinn, Paul Guilfoyle, Kathleen Langlois, Jennifer Berry, Jennifer Dragon, Samantha Kelly, Jennifer Caine Natenshon, Amelia Claire Novotny
Screenplay by: Bruce Robinson, Neil Jordan
Production Design by: Nigel Phelps
Cinematography by: Darius Khondji
Film Editing by: Tony Lawson
Costume Design by: Jeffrey Kurland
Set Decoration by: Gretchen Rau
Art Direction by: Martin Laing
Music by: Elliot Goldenthal
MPAA Rating: R for violence/terror and language.
Distributed by: DreamWorks Pictures
Release Date: January 15, 1999
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