WAKING NIGHTMARE movie poster | ©2023 Terror Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Diane Franklin, Shelley Regner, Jamison Newlander, Gabby West, Every Heart, Ryan Bonnick, Brian Farmer, Stephen Wu, Brian Tyler Cohen, Yan Birch, David Naughton
Writer: Brian Farmer
Directors: Steven Joseph Craig & Brian Farmer
Distributor: Terror Films
Release Date: August 18, 2023 (VOD)

WAKING NIGHTMARE begins with a sleeping nightmare. It’s bracingly weird, represented on a tiny TV-type screen in the middle of the viewing screen. Then Jordan (Shelley Regner), who is having the nightmare, wakes up screaming.

Jordan’s parents, Danielle (Diane Franklin) and Jeff (Jamison Newlander), rush into their daughter’s bedroom. Jordan dreamt about her friend Jamie (Gabby West) again, but tells Mom and Dad she’s fine.

Then we get into the impressively trippy opening credits, which combine animation (by Matt Goldberg) and live action to nightmarish effect. So far, so good.

Jordan’s lifelong pal Zoey (Every Heart) comes over to visit. As the two young women talk, we learn that Jordan left for an Ivy League education and Zoe stayed behind. But an accident, which may or may not be connected to Jamie’s suicide, has sent twenty-three-year-old Jordan out of school and back home to her folks.

Zoey doesn’t appear to have any hard feelings about their time apart and is concerned that Jordan has started sleepwalking “again.” Danielle wants Jordan to “open up” to her, which Jordan resists, which in turns makes Danielle feel hurt and rejected, and listens to an audio cassette tape that we can’t quite hear.

Jeff is much more mellow about the whole thing. Eventually, Jordan will get a job or go back to school, but for right now, he’s fine with her relaxing and hanging out with her friends.

Jordan writes in her journal, but continues to sleepwalk, which eventually leads to bigger problems.

For the first two acts, directors Steven Joseph Craig & Brian Farmer – Farmer also wrote WAKING NIGHTMARE – achieve the desired Stephen King-like balance of presenting a normal environment that suggests horror lurking just under the surface. We’re never sure where Jordan may wander as she slumbers, or what will happen when she arrives.

There is a persuasive, easy dynamic between Jordan and her friends, as well as Jordan and her dad. Regner makes a convincingly unhappy young woman who can’t break out of adolescence. Newlander finds surprising rhythms in his loving but relatively laid-back suburban dad.

Franklin has a complicated role, a mother who sometimes seems like any parent who craves true communication with their child but is clueless as to how to achieve it. Danielle occasionally becomes frantic in her efforts, and Franklin ratchets up so that the character seems consistent.

WAKING NIGHTMARE runs just one hour and twelve minutes. This is not necessarily a flaw – the awesome HOST is under an hour – but by the forty-five minutes mark, we start to worry. Either we’re just going to continue to roam with Jordan, disturbingly but with little ultimate impact, or get some super-rushed exposition. It’s the latter. Even though it’s action as much as words, what happens is shockingly counterintuitive.

It’s hard not to be yanked clear out of the movie experience with lots of questions, chief among them, isn’t this action going to cause the immediate opposite of the intended effect?

WAKING NIGHTMARE is largely unsettling, which means it deserves a better thought-out climax all the more.

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