Audience Member
This film reminds me of a Salvador Dali painting. The music and lighting is a movie onto itself. If you appreciate the art of film, horror, lighting and music, this has it all!
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
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Audience Member
Another badly acted & amateurish Canadian horror.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
<B><I>AEGRI SOMNIA</I> (2008)</B>, Independent
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: James Rewucki
FEATURING: Tyhr Trubiak, Mel Marginet, Warren Louis Wiltshire, Nadine Pinette, Daryl Dorge, Johnny Marlow
GENRE: <B>HORROR</B>
TAGS: psychological thriller, puzzler
RATING: <B> 7 PINTS OF BLOOD</B>
PLOT:<B> A man is hounded by his peculiar friends and haunted by disturbing visions in this stylish, formalist horror thriller.</B>
COMMENTS: Light on plot, heavy on atmosphere, Aegri Somnia, which means literally, a sick man's dreams, is an offbeat, optically stunning, independent effort by Winnipeg director James Rewucki. Effective, yet foreboding and almost visually overpowering in the way it pours across the screen like the gush of a blood bucket accidentally kicked over onto a canvas, Rewuckie describes the film as being 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. In Egar's outlook, the very world seems a giant machine which seeks to grind up Edgar 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 own 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 Victor, or manipulate and victimize him in the course of bizarre exploits. Edgar's wife is a hostile nag, his boss is verbally abusive, and everyone around Edgar tries to draw him into unpleasant, precarious situations.
When Edgar's shrewish wife prepares a nice supper for him, unfairly berates him, 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 cryptically speak in code and symbolic double entendre, alluding to .. what? Something awful. At night, monsters visit Edgar in sickening nightmares. Why?
What is happening to Edgar? He has somehow managed to crack open a door between this world, and some twisted, alternate dimension of the next. It's a dreadful door that should have remained shut. Can Edgar find a way to close it again? Or will this new, loathsome reality continue to envelop Edgar until it swallows him up?
Aegri Somnia is an optically engrossing bit of modern art, and it bears obvious influences from other films. Plot-wise, it's an odyssey, in a similar vein to Carnival Of Souls (1962), but there's 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 strikingly reminiscent of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977). Edgar's entrapment among hellish creatures of abomination 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 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 provide a bizarre experience akin to riding through some 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.
I give Aegri Somnia three pints of blood for its story, which I subtract from ten for its visual impact. So overall, 7 PINTS OF BLOOD.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
C- = Slightly below average
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/23/23
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