I’m going to try doing a “compliment sandwich” with this one because I have mixed feelings about it. It’s not what I would call a mediocre movie like most of its fellow Shudder movies, because I liked some things and hated others. But mediocrity, that’s the hobgoblins of cinema.

Sarah is a high school student, but EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD THEY MAKE SURE YOU KNOW SO CERTAIN EVENTS CAN TAKE PLACE. She has run away from home for reasons we are never told. Her mom has an 80s model De Ville sedan and Sarah has a Weekend at Bernie’s poster on her wall as all 80s teens did, but confusingly Sarah also has a smartphone. So who the hell knows when this is set. There is a good reason for this, though maybe it’s not presented very well.

Anyway, Sarah has nightmares that are sort of hard to see but there may be shadow people involved, and she drinks a lot of coffee and gets bullied at school and has one friend named Zoe. In the coffee shop with the cute name I can’t remember, Sarah finds a flyer with the phone numbers you tear off at the bottom for a paid sleep study and she’s excited to have a place to sleep other than the sliding board at the playground so she signs up. Unfortunately, the sleep study might be messing with her mind, and one of the researchers is a creep. Then her phone disappears after she has a seizure at the laundromat and now she can’t find Zoe, but the creep sure finds Sarah.

OK, here are the good things I liked, part one. I was compelled to finish the movie even though I read spoilers to confirm that this wasn’t going to make any fucking sense in the end. The lead actress made me feel for her, which is great because she carried the movie. The whole movie did convey a mood of sadness, paranoia, and nausea. I also liked that something bad seemed to happen to the creepy guy. And when all the SCIENCE stuff was revealed, it was cool as hell.

And the bad stuff? The thing that happened to the creepy guy probably didn’t happen. Unrelated, why does every movie have to be olive green now? The dreams were the same color as the waking life, which also kind of makes sense given the BIG TWIST, but I’m tired of looking at it. I started watching this hoping to see some scary nightmares but they just looked like a point and click video game. The ending came out of nowhere, which I’m sure the writer would say was not true because he put a bunch of clues in the form of chapter cards, and I would have liked to know WHY Sarah was in the situation she was in. The twist is one of those things that happens in movies a lot, and it’s not amnesia or quicksand or they were dead the whole time. Finally, there were just too many references to other movies. You don’t need a shirt that says Romero on it and a guy named Riff or Raff because the main character is cool enough to know what Rocky Horror is despite being only EIGHTEEN.

I didn’t hate all the referential stuff though. There was some talk of Philip K. Penis which I couldn’t be bothered to look up but I’m sure had something to do with being asleep. And there was a Terminator poster which may have also gone with the character being named Sarah, and maybe that was a clue. Bleeding from the corners of the eyes spontaneously makes me think of City of the Living Dead aka The Gates of Hell which is the perfectly good title that movie had back in the EIGHTIES.

In summary, I would probably not even complain about anything happening here if the movie had actually been made in the 80s. So go ahead and make your own inscrutable damn movie because everyone who doesn’t understand it is an electric sheep. Did anyone else watch School Spirits on Paramount Plus? That also featured a blonde waif who is in a situation, and the explanation at the end came out of fucking nowhere. But that’s probably going to get another season, this isn’t. There is little point in having a bunch of symbolism if you don’t get your message across for us idiots in the back row.