Independent filmmakers come up with great horror concepts and this one mines the stuff of nightmares for its material. The director Anthony Scott Burns and the cast aren’t complete unknowns but they’re all new enough that most people probably haven’t seen anything they have been it. This film is imperfect in that it offers no satisfactory explanation to the strange phenomena that happens in it, yet as my wife notes that may be a deliberate decision to heighten its scariness and this is indeed one horror film that is undoubtedly scary.

Young student Sara Dunn has run away from home and while sleeping rough in the open or at the houses of friends, is afflicted by terrifying nightmares. One day she sees a notice asking for paid volunteers for a sleep study at a university and signs up. The study involves wiring up the participants to sensors so that the research assistants can monitor their sleep throughout the night. After one such session, Sara is shown a series of images to see if she has a reaction to them. Most of the images do nothing to her but the last one includes a shadowy figure with glowing white eyes and causes her to have a panic attack. She then refuses to participate any further in the study and runs away. The young scientist Riff who leads the project tries to persuade Sara to come back and reluctantly reveals to her that their sensors convert brainwave patterns into images that can then be shown on a screen. In this way, they are able to see into the dreams of the sleeping participants and the image she was shown was taken from her own nightmares.

I have no idea if lead actress Julia Sarah Stone’s eyes are naturally like that or if it’s just part of playing the role but she spends the whole film looking like she’s constantly struggling to stay awake. When she does fall asleep, creepy and inexplicable visions inevitably ensue so the audience is primed to expect the worst. She is always moving and on the run, as if simply finding a safe place to sleep would be a victory in of itself. The tension and sense of atmosphere throughout is fantastic, supported by the synthpop soundtrack that is usually found in cyberpunk films. It fits well with the prevalent imagery used here: monitors with scan lines; clean and cold rooms; eerily empty hospitals and so on. The audience is constantly kept on edge, unsure if there actually is some supernatural phenomena at work as it seems that some mundane explanation is possible, anticipating some terrifying horror to be revealed from the reactions of the research assistants studying the data, seeking some answers to all of the dangling questions.

Yet this film practically makes an art out of refusing to answer questions. It teases at many different explanations for Sarah’s nightmares, a shared collective unconscious, strange beings trying to cross over into our reality etc., but commits to none of them. Surprisingly it even refuses to provide answers to seemingly mundane questions like just why isn’t Sarah staying in her house with her mother? Why do we see Sarah’s friend Zoe who lets her stay in her room one night but then never see again even when Sarah goes looking for her in the club? Whatever happened to the other girl who was sleeping in the same room as Sarah as part of the study? I believe that the director deliberately left all of these plot hooks hanging to drive viewers to seek out answers and it also accentuates the sense of confusion and frustration when no answers seem forthcoming. It’s effective to ensure that the film is scary or least creepy throughout but it also sort of feels like cheating. I doubt that the director would be able to get away with pulling this off a second time.

As I’ve said before most horror films aren’t truly scary but it does seem that independent filmmakers are getting better at it by playing around with the conventions of the genre and breaking the rules. I would recommend this to anyone who watches horror films in order to be actually scared but I can’t say that I admire Burns as a director for this as it does rather depend on a cheap trick to be effective.