Let's Summarize this Film - Part 1

Parasomnia - A Summary

Wow, what can be said about this clunker. Not only is it a dull thriller, but there is some seriously messed up sub-text.

Let's get the plot of the film out of the way. It's revealed to you in fragmented elements, in an unnecessary and blatant bid to string the viewer along on the notion that there is an interesting reveal forthcoming.

There isn't.

Here's what happened with all the 'fill in the blanks' annotated in chronological order:

A woman takes her son to sell some Mary-Kay to a client of hers who has a daughter with PARASOMNIA, which is essentially a catch-all for any and all sleep related disorders. While both mothers are bartering over beauty products, the inquisitive son glimpses a girl walking around upstairs. He goes up to meet her, they act weird and touch each other's faces and the girl collapses.

~20 years later 'aka fill in the blanks', this episode is completely absent from the boy's (now a young man) memory...that is until he picks his speed addicted friend up from a place that is both a drug rehab clinic, a cutting edge sleep therapy center, and a prison for mentally deranged mass serial murderers. There are exactly 3 rooms in this clinic, one for each disparate malady that would never be treated in the same institution and are all somehow overseen by the same doctor.

We are now heavy in the exposition portion of this film. The criminal, but occasionally necessary part of a clumsy conceit. The truly aggravating thing about this exposition bit, is it really doesn't explain anything...except taking a long time to get around to explaining why this guys roommate was in what appeared to be a psychiatric/mental ward. It takes like 15 minutes for them to explain he was going through a drug rehabilitation program that he might have voluntarily placed himself in, because he wanted to observe strange characters and behaviors for whatever his artistic endeavor is. He's an aspiring writer of some sort? I don't KNOW, and it takes 15 minutes to unveil this!

Anyway, after having a mildly (read: heavy-handedly) portentious talk with his roommate/friend/whatever about the right/wrong girl, our protagonist (the boy from the beginning) goes to observe the madman they keep chained up down the hall...except he never quite gets there, because his interest in this macabre sideshow is supplanted by a glimpse of a girl sleeping in a room in a hospital.

This is clearly so surreal and outlandish to sidetrack this man from his previous task and he walks into the room and paws this girl wonderously. He doesn't even realize until this point that she appears to be comatose, so he was kinda just groping what he believed to be a sleeping, possibly sedated woman. I'm actually not sure which reading of this situation is more vile.

Yes, you read that right. This is the beautiful beginnings of a romance between a grown man and a mostly comatose woman with the, as yet unrevealed, mental capacity of a child.

The Doctor (not that one), stumbles upon this scene with kinda less suspicion than one might imagine. They have a very dull and amicable conversation which is all part of the really unnecessary exposition about the protagonists friend who won't feature in this story ever again.

We then smash cut to the protag and the now released 'addicts' loft? There are a lot of questions here. As the protag was not picking up his friend the day he romantically groped a comatose stranger, how much time has passed exactly? It can't be the same day. Why would he make two trips to meet his friend, if he was just going to pick him up the next day? Reasonably...some time has passed, yet they talk about the incident as if it just happened...over cereal and beer...or cereal and soda...I'm not sure what the point of this is...but it's there. To paint a better picture, they mix themselves up some grits(?) and then soup-it-up with some beer or soda and slurp it out of their bowls. Hrm...

Now, some blatantly retroactive writing happens here. The roommate asks the protagonist about the madman he directed him to dheck out at the rehab/sleep therapy/criminally insane ward. The protagonist exposits some of his observations about the man. Except...he never made it to view the madman, he got sidetracked by the girl and the doctor's queries, which were neither duly aggressive nor duly invasive enough considering the state he found this stranger with his ward, to somehow send the protagonist (it's gonna feel hard to call him this after a while), running.

And yet the film firmly established that is EXACTLY what happened immediately preceding this smash-cut.

This meeting NEVER happened, sloppy film! We aren't even out of the Setup portion of this thriller yet, almost NOTHING has happened, and the writer/director/production has managed to confuse itself already!

To be cont'd -->