Get ready for the dream you are chasing to turn around and start chasing you after viewing the impressive indie Canadian chiller Phantom Paradox, written and directed by D. Morgan. Samuel Murray (Cedric Brouillard) is having a miserable existence at university. He is regularly called a loser and has water bottles thrown at him when he rides his bike. He is late for classes and is doing poorly on his grades, as he usually tunes out in class with earbuds. The girl he has a crush on, Sarah (Gaelle Tremblay), is unimpressed and is already hanging around with Finn (Josue Soulard). Between Finn’s bullying and Sarah’s indifference, Samuel seeks escape at night with a podcast by sleep influencer Drax (Yaniv Levi).
Samuel is learning from Drax how to lucid dream, which allows Samuel to control the reality of his dreams, making things go his way for once. Samuel thrives with this newfound power in his dreams, walking around with the powers of a budding god. There is this mysterious fellow (Edouard Simard), who keeps showing up without Samuel asking him to. This person doesn’t speak, just stares at Samuel endlessly. Samuel is starting to believe this silent stranger is not a part of his subconscious. Things start to happen in the dreams that Samuel didn’t ask for, and soon, he is not sure when he is awake or asleep. It is at that point Drax gets around to the podcast episode about lucid nightmares.
“Samuel thrives with this newfound power in his dreams, walking around with the powers of a budding god.”
Phantom Paradox is a clever film shot on a campus that deserves to be studied on every campus. Morgan never hides that he is shooting at a college, which is a crucial move for on-campus shoots. Trying to disguise an empty college campus as anything else, like a secret government facility or a police station, never works, as the rows of lockers are a dead giveaway. Morgan not only leans into the college setting, but he is also able to establish the mundane world Brouillard’s character is fleeing from in record time.
Even those not sympathetic to higher learners will feel for how awful Brouillard’s daily toil is, which thankfully we are allowed to escape from as well. Morgan strikes gold with the lucid dreaming sequences, as the audience shares Brouillard’s anarchistic glee from being able to bend the dream reality to his will. It also plays into the classic cinema fantasy as to what you would do if you were in a movie that you were directing yourself. The cathartic releases the audience gets to share with the main character in these scenes help keep the momentum high as the movie careens into the darker second half.
"…proves the oldest tricks still work when you have to pull magic out of a budget of thin air."
