Plot: Follows Carol, a dissatisfied mother struggling to find connection within her marriage and family. Looking to get her life back on track, she signs up for an avant-garde, AI-led digital wellness retreat that promises to reset how she approaches life. But when Carol returns home, she discovers that the helper robot sent to assist her family in her absence has become a more perfect version of herself – and has no intention of giving her old life back.
Review: Black Mirror has pretty much ruined dystopian and technohorror for filmmakers. Charlie Brooker’s speculative anthology has become the modern-day The Twilight Zone and cornered the market on telling genre stories about the most terrifying “what-if” scenarios you could imagine, leading every new cautionary tale to be compared to it. Over the last decade, I have invoked Black Mirror so many times that it feels almost unfair to storytellers out there trying to tell science fiction stories that critique our contemporary culture and where we may be going. Dreamquil from writer-director Alex Prager, is a story that would have been devastating and prescient had it been released 15 years ago. But in the shadow of Black Mirror, Dreamquil ends up feeling like something that we have already seen and heard countless times before, despite solid performances from Elizabeth Banks and John C. Reilly.
Set in a retro-future with a 1950s-style design aesthetic, Dreamquil follows Carol Gibson (Elizabeth Banks), a bored housewife and mother who longs for something that she can’t quite put her finger on. A realtor trying to get a promotion, Carol doesn’t feel the same connection to her husband, Gary (John C. Reilly), or her son that she should. While Gary wants to return to the seaside calm of their former home in Pismo Beach, Carol wants to remain in the urban confines of the big city despite unbreathable air that forces everyone to wear facemasks and live in plastic enclosures. Carol also seeks solace in a virtual reality unit that helps her escape the ennui of her mundane life. When Gary says her distance may doom their family and marriage, Carol undergoes the title treatment. Gone for a week-long procedure, Carol returns to find her family functioning well without her and the presence of a robot doppelganger called Carol Two.
At first, the set design and production values of Dreamquil lent it an eerie and strange quality that drew me in. Seeing Mad Men, but sci-fi gives the series a Jetsons feel, but one that feels realistic within the confines of the story. Elizabeth Banks does a good job of portraying Carol as a woman lost in her own life. The hints and teases about technology as a solution are timely, given how we use various apps and tools in the real world, but it comes across as a bit on the nose. Carol discusses how she feels and what she can do in her life with her close friend Rebecca (Sofia Boutella), who has undergone the Dreamquil process and speaks highly of it. That, along with constant advertisements featuring Dreamquil founder Margo Case (Kathryn Newton), convinces Carol to try it. Under the watchful gaze of Nurse Chapman (Juliette Lewis), Carol awakens refreshed before things at home turn sinister. Is the robot Carol truly evil in trying to replace the real person? Is Gary having an affair with the android in his home? Is Carol simply losing her mind? All valid questions whose answers we already seem to have figured out based on the events of the film and, yes, all the episodes of Black Mirror we’ve seen.
The bulk of the film takes place within the Gibson’s apartment, with Elizabeth Banks playing Carol as a woman spiraling into paranoia. John C. Reilly is fairly generic in his portrayal as the beleaguered husband, unsure of what the hell is going on. The rest of the cast amount to barely little more than cameos, with Kathryn Newton and Juliette Lewis’s screen time totaling no more than five minutes each. Sofia Boutella has glimmers of a more interesting performance, but she is underused. Both Elizabeth Banks and John C. Reilly are so much fun to watch on screen in everything that they do that it often feels that they are not doing as much as they could have with this story. There is a restraint in this story, maybe as a result of the ethereal feel of the production, that prevents you from really associating too much with the characters on screen. Dreamquil regularly feels like we’re watching a 1950s soap opera through the guise of a horror story, but it never feels truly tangible and maintains a distance from the audience.
Clocking in at just under ninety minutes, Dreamquil moves very quickly, but I can’t help but feel like an extended episode of an anthology TV series rather than a worthwhile feature film. Writers Alex Prager and Vanessa Prager both have backgrounds in art, and I love all of the visual elements and production values. The soundtrack also feels anachronistic, as it includes songs from various eras that clash with the movie’s palette. The further the film goes, the more it feels like it’s losing the sense established from the beginning and turning into a more rote and formulaic tale. I didn’t feel surprised or shocked by anything that happens on screen. What surprised me more than anything is how unoriginal this movie feels. There is a moment halfway through the movie that I thought felt ripped entirely from Total Recall, possibly the most unexpected inspiration I could have thought of for this film.
Dreamquil is an underwhelming movie that doesn’t say as much as it thinks it does or as much as it would like to. There are many TV series episodes that accomplish more in 40 minutes than this movie does in an hour and a half. It wastes the talent and star power of both Elizabeth Banks and John C. Reilly while offering very little new to the genre. While it pales in comparison to even the weakest episodes of Black Mirror, Dreamquil does have a visual aesthetic that should serve as an impressive example of what director Alex Prager is capable of. Dreamquil could have been an irreverent, under-the-radar film had it stuck to the promise of the production design introduced at the beginning of the film, rather than devolving into another AI cautionary tale. A nice movie to look at, but not worth investing in for the full running time.
Dreamquil is now playing in theaters.
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