A couple retreats to a remote cabin in “Dream Eater,” a stiff found-footage horror movie set in the snowy Laurentian Mountains outside of Montreal. It’s also the second film released under the banner of Eli Roth’s new independent studio, the Horror Section — though this endorsement mostly flops.
Mallory Drumm and Alex Lee Williams (pulling triple duty as the film’s directors and writers, alongside Jay Drakulic) star as the predictably ill-fated lovers, Mallory and Alex, the latter of whom suffers from parasomnia episodes that pose threats to his own life. Now Mallory, a documentary filmmaker, is intent on rehabilitating her beau by keeping a kind of video diary of his activities.
In the film’s liveliest scenes, Mallory witnesses Alex’s disturbing sleepwalking spells via shaky-cam imagery and a green-glowing night vision lens. Using found footage is a reliable strategy for ultra-low-budget horror filmmakers (think of “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity”) and “Dream Eater,” a transparently lo-fi production, gets some spooks from the camera’s fuzzy, darkened point-of-view.
It helps that Alex, a large man with a metalhead’s mane of dark hair, looks so creaturelike from a distance, though his nightly freak-outs become repetitive — even when a supernatural element linked to Alex’s childhood is introduced.
Williams’s eerie performance flip flops from lovable goofball to raving ghoul, but Drumm’s artificial delivery only brings out the script’s clumsiness. So when talk of cults and demonic spirits comes up, courtesy of video calls with Alex’s sister and a paranormal researcher, the effect is kind of goofy.
There’s a deeper layer about relationships — the pains we go through to fix our loved ones; the great unknowns that remain between us and the people with whom we share our beds — that’s obscured by this rote turn to more obviously sinister territory. Less, here, would have really frightened more.
Dream Eater
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
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