Interview with a psychic

>> In Dreams is an editing nightmare

by JOANNE LATIMER

"Are you psychic?" a cop asks Annette Bening, the heroine of In Dreams.

"I hate that word," she replies. "So do I," adds her husband (Aidan Quinn).

At that point in the film, so does the audience. In Dreams gives psychic power a bad name. Neil Jordan's horror film is a confused drama loaded with continuity flubs and basic illogic.

"This film is not like Jason," director Neil Jordan told the Irish Times last February in Dublin. "It's more about dread." Maybe it was about dread--prior to audience testing and new endings. But now, In Dreams is more about cinematic damage control. The so-called plot is a messy patch job that tries to make sense of all the gorgeous flashbacks and dream scenes. Jordan wisely shot this film with dramatic lighting and arty camera work, knowing he could fall back on the cinematography if this Big Studio project got out of hand.

It did. The premise sounds good for the screen: a children's book illustrator (Bening) gets psychic visions in her sleep that predict the murder of abducted children. Her own child gets snatched and Bening tries to commit suicide. While detained in an asylum, she dreams of her husband's death and realizes that her dreams are directed by a stalker who used to be locked up in the very same room at the nut house. Bening's shrink (Jordan regular Stephen Rea) doesn't believe her yet and she's forced to escape--an escape masterminded by her stalker (Robert Downey, Jr, of all people), who's explained away as a lonely hermit who haunts an apple orchard.

Jordan mixes in shots of an underwater town and flashbacks of a small boy who was left chained to a bed to drown. He wrote nursery rhymes all over the walls and had a Joan Crawford-like mother who died (I think). The underwater town is never explained, along with a few other niggling details, and the internal logic of the film starts to take on a blurry distortion of its own. The film's only scary bits are about Bening's frustration inside her padded cell and the desensitized attendants at the asylum.

It's safe to assume that Jordan took the job to literally buy time to develop his real work--like last year's The Butcher Boy. His American films always feel like piecework, or luxurious craft projects (see Interview With a Vampire), and In Dreams is a bit of both.

In Dreams opens Friday, January 15