A young woman is tormented in her sleep in this crepuscular debut feature from Norwegian writer-director Kjersti Helen Rasmussen
f there is one place you would have thought a sleep-deprived person might be able to stop herself dropping off, it’s in a lecture about sleep. But that’s what this atmospheric but somewhat heavy-handed debut feature fromhas its protagonist Mona do as she is introduced by dishevelled academic Aksel to the possibility that she has become the victim of the mythical incubus Mare.
Nightmare also belongs to the school of property horror already occupied by The Tenant and Mother! Left alone by Robby, a high-flyer preoccupied with some kind of algorithmic investment venture, Mona is charged with renovating their sprawling new apartment which they acquired on the cheap after its previous occupant, who was pregnant, died in a mysterious accident. Their neighbours, who have a newborn baby and are prone to staring eerily across the courtyard, seem to have issues, too.
Restricting Mona’s mental disintegration in the dingy apartment, writer-director Kjersti Helen Rasmussen at first confines her film to the tasteful realist parameters of much “elevated horror”: that the encroaching supernatural is somehow a Babadook-style manifestation of Mona’s desire to resist adulthood, responsibility and maturity. There is nothing wrong per se with the second-half switch as the Mare is revealed as something more, but the film doesn’t flesh things out convincingly.
Nightmare does maintain a crepuscular glower throughout, and Rasmussen chops up waking and dream scenes to disorientating effect; sometimes we’re not sure which is which. But with several rather forced plot points also intruding into this delirium – like their neighbour’s final skull-pulverising meltdown – the film flirts with drifting into nonsense; less inspired dream logic than a retreat from its initial psychological clarity.
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