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DIRECTED BY: Nathan Catucci

FEATURING: Santino Fontana, Devika Bhise, Chris Henry Coffey

PLOT: With the prospect of a juicy grant on the line, a professor needs to keep his project together; the murder of one of his participants complicates this prospect.

COMMENTS: A social worker, a painter, and a dominatrix walk into a sleep study… But that suggests that Impossible Monsters is more interesting than it actually is. It isn’t for want of trying (more on that in the bloated plot paragraph to come). Fulfilling its obligation as a “psychological thriller,” there is a twist; in keeping with the “sleep study” premise, there are a lot of dream sequences (over a dozen by my count); and in homage to the title-inspiring quote, “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters,” there is plenty of mention of Francisco de Goya. But all the pieces, and there are many, add up to a dense sludge of events that awkwardly drips over the edges of its narrative container, making a mess on the floor.

Rich Freeman (Santino Fontana) is a university professor in New York City, focusing on sleep/dreams/etc., with a deeper focus on “sleep paralysis.” To further aid mankind (and, to a lesser extent, his career), he proposes a study involving three volunteers who will discuss their dreams, keep a dream journal, and in the process have various socio-emotio-sexual interactions with each other. Meanwhile, Freeman’s friend/adversary Doctor Engle is busy cheating on his wife with one of Freeman’s students, Jo (Devika Bhise), a self-described “sexual pain exploration specialist” (or, “SPES” in the industry jargon). Jo has a crush on Freeman, and is unhappy that Freeman is in a relationship with another of the study’s participants, a young social worker who dreams of starting a non-profit in Albany, N.Y. Freeman’s mentor, who works with veterans suffering from PTSD, wants Freeman to join him and “make a difference” in Albany. The dean of the unspecified university, however, wants the prestige that would accompany the Really Big Grant from some pharmaceutical concern, which somehow hinges solely on Freeman’s work with three subjects. The third person is Otis, a soft-spoken painter who was raised in foster care and may or may not have been raped in his early teens and may or may not have, later, burnt down the home of his foster family, killing them in the process.

I don’t enjoy burning up 230+ words on plot exposition, but a sense of the goings-on is necessary to emphasize the importance of telling a story. Not six or seven stories, and certainly not so many stories crammed into an 84-minute movie. Everything interrelates, of course (and, speaking of relations, the lapse of professional ethics on display in Impossible Monsters is astounding). But if you’ve only got so much time and so much budget, cuts needs must. It wasn’t without its charm–and as someone who lives quite near Albany, I do love it when “Upstate New York” gets mentioned as a glorious place to escape to. But Impossible Monsters is a case of too much narrative flab supported by too little narrative bone and sinew. As such, it never really gets moving.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…at times gets too baroque for its own good, straining for a Ken Russell-like hallucinatory style that it doesn’t fully succeed in pulling off. But it’s an admirably ambitious and accomplished debut for its tyro filmmaker who should easily move on to bigger things.”–Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter (festival screening)