Critics reviews

What initially comes across as a hokey attempt to just show people's nightmares – and thus connect a hackneyed daisy-chain between movies and spooky interior projections – is revealed as a sincere attempt to actually articulate the subtle patterns that crop up in the minds of sufferers across the globe... Even though the task is akin to herding cats, Ascher does at least attempt to come away with a few basic conjectures...

This is a film intended to entertain rather than inform, and though there's nothing wrong with that, the fact that the tired and harrowed Mancunian diver doesn't seem to realise there's help available on the NHS is deeply troubling. Unhelpful to the afflicted then, but probably fascinating to the easy-sleeper.

The result is an unusually frightening documentary – and given the insistence of Jeff R. that sleep paralysis is a "sleep-transmitted disease" that you can contract (as he did) merely by being told about it, Ascher's film holds out the sinister promise of triggering a new outbreak amongst its own viewers.

The issue with The Nightmare isn't necessarily in its aim to awkwardly position the viewer, it's in the execution of the film as a whole, packed with fairly limp talking head interviews and relying on dopey jump scares. Unlike the restrained and seemingly complex Room 237, his latest film feels far too one-note to be anything more than a cursory exploration of sleep paralysis married with an inconsistent visual representation of those fears.

The Nightmare is more effective than the esoteric "Room 237" because it represents a full immersion into a common human experience. The re-enactments are superb. While there are similarities in the stories, each person has a different version of the same experience, and Ascher and his production team has worked beautifully to help bring that to life.

The human brain, this movie suggests, is the ultimate horror-movie director, and sleep-paralysis hallucinations are just an extreme form of the standard-issue nightmares we all unwillingly create on a regular basis. It's one thing to be tormented. It's another thing to face the grim reality that you're tormenting yourself.

With The Nightmare, Ascher abandons the strictures of a conventional documentary to frolic in the terrifying netherworlds of human consciousness. It's not enough for Ascher, a sufferer himself, to tell his audience about sleep paralysis—they have to feel it, too.

As an analytical exercise, "The Nightmare" pales in comparison to "Room 237." Examining art is different from exploring a scientific phenomenon, and here the absence of medical experts seems evasive. Pesky neuroscientific theories could only dampen the atmosphere of terror that Mr. Ascher works so hard to establish. While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, "The Nightmare" declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.

If you're going to go the new age route then by all means take up fiction filmmaking like that bastion of profundity, M. Night Shyamalan—otherwise leave mysterious phenomena to pros like Werner Herzog, whose truth-bendings at least take more complex, entertaining, and well-researched form.

The premise is invitingly simple: People discuss their nightmares with director Rodney Ascher, who stages them as short horror films. Yet The Nightmare ineffably feels more dangerous than that description allows. Imagine watching a movie with an audio commentary featuring people who've been emotionally damaged by watching it, and you'd be close to capturing this film's simultaneously invasive, empathetic tonality.

I found it extremely effective at times, and I found myself dreading certain subjects' dreams, as they hit some deep-seated childhood fears of mine (someone tapping on the window in the middle of the night!). But Ascher's ensemble-structure started to get a bit tiresome after a while, and I would have loved something to break up the tension of seeing one nightmare after another.

Rodney Ascher, with The Nightmare, made another warmly democratic, non-judgmental documentary portrait of the New Media Age by allowing ordinary, inexpert individuals a platform to publicly practice their wiki-acquired psychoanalysis skills.