Nightmare

What is this movie? I sit here, having finished it, not understanding the myriad bizarre choices this movie makes. Nothing here feels right. The score can be so wildly inappropriate for the moment, like an early scene after George, the killer, is struggling with his mental health after killing someone, and the music is … a solo recorder. Literally the worst instrument on the planet to be by itself. Or a scene later on, where we know George is about to kill a guy sitting on the stairs smoking a joint, and the score is a bunch of random solo fart noises from a tuba. How about the characterization of women? Susan, the protagonist (and George’s ex-wife) is a single mom in her 30’s. Susan is portrayed in two ways; as a mom, she’s harried and either treats her kids with cold dismissal, or outright disdain. As a woman, she’s sexually active and portrayed as a desirable woman, which is kind of progressive for the 80’s. But then, EVERY woman (with the exception of a jogger) in this movie either gets naked, teases nudity, or is shown in an otherwise sexually suggestive scene. The killer is given this elaborate backstory of being a schizophrenic with amnesia, confusing dreams for reality, homicidal ideation, and seizures. Already, that’s a LOT. That doesn’t even get into what triggered it. But forget that, because while he’s committed, he’s enrolled in a secret government medication program designed to cure him and control him so he can be a military asset. This is never really explored, so it’s simultaneously too much backstory and not enough. And he constantly has flashbacks to the trigger event (NOT dreams), so the amnesia part isn’t right, and nor is the dream confusion. And his kills make no sense; the triggering event was catching his dad in the act of kinky sex, so he kills … a random woman he finds at a restaurant? And a jogger? And a 9 year old boy?!? And how could his doctors proclaim him “cured” and ready for society when it takes him less than 24 hours to re-trigger his homicidal tendencies? Was he lying to them about his condition, or are they just inept? There’s production issues galore, including two scenes with two characters centered in frame and talking, but we can’t hear their dialogue at all; the close-ups on the kill shots that expose the cheap plastic dummies; herky-jerky edits that stop your suspension of disbelief. And if the production isn’t hampering the movie, the direction is; there’s the baffling choice to play enough of the triggering event in the past to get the gist of it, only to play the scene in full AT THE VERY END OF THE MOVIE; having the mom’s boyfriend have a sit-down talk with one of her kids on the beach, but positioning the camera behind a thatch of tall grass, so they’re mostly occluded from view; having that same kid able to fire both a handgun and a rifle with dead-eye accuracy and absorb all kickback without trace; or perhaps the most confounding choice of all, a third-wall breaking wink at the camera by the protag’s son in the final shot. This movie is just … it’s weird. It’s never boring, I’ll give it that, but it’s never good either. And it’s not bad in an offensive way, or a dull way, or a Troll 2/Birdemic inept way. It’s just pulled down by so many choices that are inexplicable. You’ll watch to see what the movie does next, because you’ll sit there going “it can’t get any weirder”. Yes, it can.