Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

In Dreams Blu-ray Movie Review

Dream a little dream of me...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown December 8, 2023

Ah yes, the 1990s. Romeo + Juliet. Fight Club. Pulp Fiction. The Cell. Se7en. Rushmore. The Craft. Magnolia. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Trainspotting. The Matrix. Dark City. The Game. And, lesser known and certainly lesser loved, director Neil Jordan's In Dreams. Daring, ambitious films that straddled the line between style over substance (and all the ills that go with it) and substance bathed in true cinematic style. In Dreams is unfortunately not the latter. A thriller wrapped in an overwrought premise, featuring characters with whom it's difficult to connect and supernatural intrigue it's tough to buy, and a cheap setup and payoff that promises more than it delivers? Not exactly a classic. Instead, In Dreams is a divisive flick that has its fans but has just as many detractors. It doesn't help that it completely flopped at the box office (earning a mere $12 million on a $30 million budget) and all but raced to the bottom of the bargain bin on home video. Years passed. Then decades. Long forgotten, In Dreams nevertheless is back, unfortunately with a Blu-ray debut that isn't nearly strong enough to raise the film's corpse from its grave.

After a clairvoyant mother and children's book illustrator named Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) has a disturbing dream about the murder of a young girl, her eight-year-old daughter, Rebecca (Katie Sagona), is found dead in a reservoir. She soon begins to believe she has a dreamworld connection to a murderer that she must stop from killing again. When the police dismiss Cooper's offers to help their investigation and she's pushed to the edge of her sanity, she seeks treatment with a therapist named Dr. Silverman (Stephen Rea), who diagnoses her as emotionally disturbed and psychotic. As Cooper's dreams become increasingly vivid, she grows concerned that her psychic link to serial killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.) is drawing her towards an even greater danger she can't fully understand. Director Neil Jordan's film also stars Aidan Quinn, Paul Guilfoyle, Prudence Wright Homes and Dennis Boutsikaris, and was written by Jordan and Bruce Robinson, based on the Bari Wood novel, "Doll's Eyes".

If Jordan's intentions were to create a film that brings with it a sense of disconnection, dissociation and confusion, well, he pulled it off. In Dreams won't lose you in its plotting; it isn't that smart. But it also unfolds like a movie that lost itself in the editing bay. Leaps in logic are frequent, minor dialogue helps explain major story developments, and characterization is as wibbly as it is wobbly. Motivations are hard to pin down and the final hurrah is laced with extreme melodrama and the kind of overacting Downey and his compatriots would make fun of multiple times in Tropic Thunder. Bening is a more than capable actress -- In Dreams released to a critical beatdown in 1999, the same year Bening garnered praise as another mother on the verge of a breakdown in American Beauty -- but here she wails and whines, cries and pulls at her hair, haunted by visions we're forced to watch. And they are torturous at times. The murder part's horrifying, sure. But it's the stylized bursts of color, swaths of hot whites and bottomless blacks, and movement through these same splashy voids that left me feeling nauseous. It all climbs over the top of over-the-top, and only settles when the story comes to its strange, honestly confounding conclusion, complete with contradictory closing scenes. I get what Jordan was going for, but he botches the landing (among other too many other things).

Baby-faced RDJ is sporting some great hair by film's end, though.

In Dreams Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

There's been a lot of debate surrounding Paramount's 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer of In Dreams. Some people feel its comparable to a first-generation Blu-ray presentation. Others suspect it's far closer to the original source than its critics suggest. My take leans towards the more positive position. The things one would typically associate with a poorly encoded image or a subpar master don't appear all that often. Black crush and opaque delineation, uneven contrast leveling and edge halos do creep in, but they either trace back to the original photography -- this is, after all, a film that employs exceedingly hot primaries, oversaturated hues and stark whiteouts in stylized dream-world flourishes -- or are indeed the product of a dated master. However, I found any artificiality to be minor. The film's fine veneer of grain occasionally grows chunky, and soft shots are sprinkled throughout the film, but even those two disappointments are relatively fleeting. And banding, blocking, other signs of encoding issues are kept to a bare minimum. In Dreams doesn't look as if it's received a proper modern-era remaster by any means, but it also doesn't look all that bad. I kind of enjoyed the presentation, truth be told. Colors are striking, the darkest areas of the image are ominous and absorbing, detail is notable, fine textures have been decently preserved, and edge definition is largely clean and tasteful. The film resembles a 1999 thriller, with all its MTV, The Cell- esque trappings, because, well, that's exactly what it is. Subjectivity will no doubt determine your final take. I did my best to capture screenshots that show the best and worst the transfer has to offer.

In Dreams Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Paramount's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track offers a marginally flawed experience that brings the overall AV presentation down a half notch. Dialogue is relatively clean, intelligible and, more often than not, well prioritized, although I eventually turned on the subtitles to ensure I was catching everything when psych ward mania and third-act hunts became more and more chaotic. The surround experience is decent -- and certainly disorienting when it's meant to be -- but it isn't nearly as immersive as one might hope for today, suffering from occasional bouts of disconnected rear speaker activity, uneven volume leveling in various channels, and a flat, at-times engaging, at-times uninviting soundfield. LFE output is assertive and loud but lacks nuance, as does most of the mix. Whether a result of heavy handed original sound design or simply average DVD-era mixing is unclear. What is clear is the In Dreams lossless track delivers an average mix.

In Dreams Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray release of In Dreams only includes the film's theatrical trailer.

In Dreams Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In Dreams is a trick flick with big ambition awash in '90s surrealism and MTV-esque hyper-stylization. Is it a bad movie? Some certainly think it is. And others would argue vehemently against such a dismissal. Me? I thought it was... fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It desperately wants to reach dreamy heights and nightmarish depths but it's a bit too desperate, grasping at everything in reach and reveling in a chaos I don't quite think director Neil Jordan means to be so incoherent. Unfortunately, Paramount's Blu-ray release is merely middle of the road. Its problematic video transfer is just okay, its DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is average, and it doesn't include any substantial supplemental content. I doubt we'll see a newer, remastered release anytime in the foreseeable future, though, so this may be as good as it ever gets.