Somnium (Scottish Premiere)

Part of Dundead Film Festival 2025 - see the full programme and book a Festival Pass. 

Where last year’s The Substance and MaXXXine utilised extreme violence to shatter the image of Hollywood as a glamorous world of smiling starlets, writer/director Racheal Cain’s Somnium approaches similar ground from a more elusive, fragmentary perspective.

Chloë Levine (2016’s The Transfiguration) gives a fearless and gripping performance as Gemma, a young woman who has just moved to Hollywood from a small town with the hopes of making it big. To make ends meet, she takes a job working nights at a Cronenbergian sleep clinic called Somnium. As Gemma struggles to win roles, she becomes friends with a suave showbiz agent called Brooks (who brings a touch of Mulholland Drive to proceedings) and keeps catching glimpses of a creature stalking the halls of Somnium at night.

Levine is onscreen in every scene, and her unshowy performance is perfectly pitched, capturing Gemma’s hopes, dreams and desires as well as her growing unease and fear. Cain offers a refreshing boots-on-the-ground view of Hollywood, an incisive portrait of the point at which the Dream Factory becomes the nightmare factory.