DIRECTED BY: James Rewucki
FEATURING: Tyhr Trubiak, Mel Marginet, Warren Louis Wiltshire, Nadine Pinette, Daryl Dorge, Johnny Marlow
PLOT: A man is hounded by his peculiar friends and haunted by disturbing visions.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Aegri Somnia is surreal, somewhere between Carnival Of Souls and Eraserhead (which it stylistically quotes). Combined with it’s strange story, exaggerated camera angles, and oddball characters, Aegri Somnia delivers a 100 percent weird viewing experience for even the most jaded bizarre movie enthusiast.
COMMENTS: Light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, Aegri Somnia (which literally means “a sick man’s dreams” in Latin), is an offbeat, visually stunning, independent effort by Winnipeg director James Rewucki. Effective and foreboding, it is almost visually overpowering in the way it pours across the screen like the gush of a blood bucket accidentally kicked onto a canvas. Rewuckie describes the film as an existential arthouse horror movie. Fans of German Expressionist filmmaking will draw comparisons to Nosferatu and The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. David Lynch enthusiasts will immediately be reminded of Eraserhead.
In the story, Edgar (Trubiak) is a simple man, cowed by his surroundings, scared of his own shadow, seemingly terrified by … life itself! Edgar is hostage to a morbid, crippling anxiety. His outlook is that the very world is a giant machine that seeks to grind him up in its gears and mash him beneath its wheels, to consume and obliterate him.
Edgar just wants to be left alone, to go to work and come home to seek the refuge of a peaceful evening in the security of his domestic surroundings. But it’s not to be.
Edgar’s coworkers, who seem normal on the surface, reveal themselves to be creeps, quiet lunatics who either marginalize or manipulate and victimize him in the course of their bizarre exploits. Edgar’s wife is a hostile nag, his boss is verbally abusive, and everyone around him draws him into unpleasant, precarious situations. When Edgar’s shrewish wife prepares a nice supper for him, unfairly berates him, and then kills herself in the bathtub, Edgar is plunged into a waking nightmare of heightened anxiety, loneliness and frightening “what-if”s?”
Edgar falls captive to malignant visions. In the shadows, unsettling shapes are lurking, and from them, dreadful whispers emanate. Edgar’s acquaintances speak in cryptic codes and symbolic double entendres, alluding to .. what? Something awful. At night, monsters visit Edgar in sickening nightmares. Why?
What is happening to him? He has somehow managed to crack open a portal between this world and some twisted, alternate dimension. It’s a dreadful door that should have remained shut. Can Edgar find a way to close it? Or will this new, loathsome reality continue to envelop him until it swallows him up?
Aegri Somnia is an optically engrossing bit of modern art, bearing obvious influences from other films. Plot-wise, it’s an odyssey in a similar vein to Carnival Of Souls (1962), but there’s more dialogue and more twists and turns. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) it’s a surrealistic story about a man struggling to keep his sanity. A final plot twist is right out of Angel Heart (1987).
Aegri Somnia is captured in black and white with periodic dramatic accents of crimson. Color sequences chronicle Edgar’s hallucinatory nightmares. The movie is filmed in a gritty, plodding, semi-documentary style, as if the camera is an appalled, mute witness. The resulting effect is not only strikingly reminiscent of Eraserhead (1977), but Edgar’s entrapment among hellish creatures of abomination also reminds us of In The Mouth Of Madness (1994). The digital special effect of rapid head-shaking is prominent throughout the film. We first saw this effect in Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and since in fare such as the remake of House On Haunted Hill (1999). Many movies openly sport such borrowed elements en masse, and too often they amount to little more than pasted together fragments of better films. Significantly, this isn’t the case with Aegri Somnia! Director James Rewucki concedes his cinematic influences. And it’s true that Aegri Somnia says nothing profound. It’s a visual exposition. Yet Rewucki imaginatively employs well-worn conventions and techniques to produce a memorable horror movie which feels fresh despite it’s derivative roots. And it’s so visually dramatic!
Aegri Somnia is unusual, disturbing, grotesque, and genuinely arty. Unsettling characters, eerie settings, and oddball events create a gruesome funhouse. But we don’t dare step out of the carriage until the end. We want to see where the ride takes us. Imaginative frames and images persist in the mind’s eye like negative aftervision, long after the tab of the final film strand disengages and flap-flap-flaps against the empty reel.
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