Product Details

• Actors: Bening, Rea
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Dreamworks Video
• VHS Release Date: August 29, 2000
• Run Time: 160 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00000IO4Q
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #162,505 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

Anyone who has seen and loved Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves should feel right at home in his off-beat psychological thriller In Dreams. A sexy, very adult take on "Little Red Riding Hood," Wolves unreeled as a series of surreal "fairy tales" interwoven within the heated dreams of a young girl verging on womanhood. Wolves' patron saints were Freud and Jung (as sifted through Jordan's wickedly fertile imagination), and the duo are very much aboard for In Dreams as well. Here's a movie that takes place entirely in dreamtime, where the dark, violent fantasies of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening)--wife, mother, and illustrator of children's books--play out unpoliced by superego, conscience, or society. On the face of it, Claire's a clairvoyant whose mind becomes more and more possessed by child-killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.). Cops and shrinks refuse to take her seriously until she loses her own daughter and much, much more. Tapping into weird images of her soulmate's childhood, when he was abused by a hateful mother in a house now submerged in a nearby reservoir, Claire comes closer and closer to her gender-shifting bad boy (and his latest victim). From start to finish, In Dreams dwells in hyperreality. Whether leeched of or drenched in color, slipping eerily through an underwater world, rushing madly toward catastrophe--every hallucinatory shot is saturated with menace. It's the kind of potent, unresolved menace that haunts your waking day after a particularly unsettling nightmare. Watch this gorgeous film as therapeutic (?) theater inside Claire's mind, where she and her murderous doppelganger act out a terrible Oedipal drama driven by sex and jealousy. Bening and Downey deliver superb, risky performances, and Darius Khondji's cinematography, with almost every frame punctuated by blood-reds, is sensuously dreamlike. In Dreams is one of those great, flawed films that reaches for more than it ultimately achieves. But what a welcome change from the dullness and shallowness of the formulaic sure things that dominate movie screens as the 20th century draws to a close. --Kathleen Murphy

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saturated colorful fury..., June 9, 2005

By	Nathan Christian (New Stanton, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Dreams (DVD)

In Dreams is an extremely surreal movie shot in beautiful colors and unforgettable imagery. Quite shocking and violent, the scenes will stay with you for days after viewing this. Annette Benning gives a top notch preformance she IS Claire!!!!And Robert Downey Jr. gives a chilling preformance as Vivian, the confused villan.Highly reccomended nail biter...just wait until the climax at the end on the bridge...

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Watching Nightmares, August 16, 2004

By	DonMac "butchm" (Lynn, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Dreams (DVD)

What a wonderfully bizarre thriller this is! Annette Benning's performance alone makes it worth watching - but there is still so much more. The story is so unsettling you never quiet get your grip once the film starts moving. From the opening credits - where a ghost town becomes submerged as a reservoir to the jump-out-of-your-seat ending, this one is a real keeper. The photography and set pieces are absolutely beautiful and do much put the viewer in Benning's head. A wild, frightening trip.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Within the Mind's Eye, February 12, 2003

By	TastyBabySyndrome "T(to the)B(to the)S" ("Daddy Dagon's Daycare" - Proud Sponsor of the Little Tendril Baseball Team, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: In Dreams (DVD)

The fabrics from which dreams are woven can be horrendous, and more catastrophic still when the visions return to the fertile grounds of your mind night after chaotic night. This point is made even more pronouncedly when the dreams happen to be about things that are occurring or are going to happen, especially when they teeter on the edge of insanity, or, as is the case with Claire, on areas that hit close to home. For several nights now she has been seeing visions of an apple orchard and a figure leading a little girl through it, leading her to believe that the child in her mind might well be a little girl that has gone missing. So, with an outstretched mentality, her mind goes searching, looking for something which she can clamp onto. Unfortunately for her, the mirror sometimes has a darker side, one that can peer into the mind that dreams visions, and that hands that can effectively whittle away many of the pieces that lead a person toward happiness, security, and the warmth that we like to call home.

In dreams had some beautiful depictions within it, capturing the aura of a town floating beneath waters unleashed by river diversion, showing a person in the first few minutes that it had a surreal feeling to it and that there was the ability to seem frightfully eerie running laps through its veins. This was further accented by the visions that were seen throughout the film, those of children and a past foretold in the shadows of a nursery rhyme wearing a shroud of insane speech and garble imagery, keeping its viewer enmeshed in the tale that was being portrayed upon the screen. It also seemed to have a storyline going for it that was interesting until the final chase that is inevitable begins to ensue, dragging on for a time before leading toward a vindictive ending that leaves everyone shattered as sprawling in the dust and that makes up for the duration of the run. This was an interesting ride, too, because getting a handle on what exactly is going to happen is a bit hard until alter in the movie, and then its all apples from there.

Combine this with the acting, which was done beautifully, the fact that the movie was something containing portions that entranced me within their bleakness, and the madness in the eyes of a Downey seems somewhat believable int he role, and you have something that is worth watching and that does the book its based on, Doll Eyes, a fair amount of justice. It'll make you question all the delightful dreams that manifest within your mind!