Movie Review: SOMNIUM

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 29th, 2025 / 02:57 AM

SOMNIUM movie poster | ©2025 Yellow Veil Pictures

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Chloë Levine, Will Peltz, Peter Vack, Clarissa Thibeaux, Grace Van Dien, Gillian White, Kio Cyr, Bries Vannon, Emily Mei, Billy Kottkamp, Draya Michele, Johnathon Schaech
Writer: Racheal Cain
Director: Racheal Cain
Distributor: Yellow Veil Pictures
Release Date: August 29, 2025 (theatrical), September 9, 2025 (VOD)

Sometimes it’s hard for a movie to effectively cover and combine all of its disparate topics.

This is the case with SOMNIUM, which presents us with three intertwined plotlines: one is a science-fiction/horror thriller, one is a trying-to-make-it-in-Hollywood tale, and one is a retrospective look at lost love.

We meet Gemma (Chloë Levine) as she’s moving into her small but agreeable L.A. apartment. Gemma, previously the graveyard shift waitress at her parents’ all-night diner in a small town in Georgia, has come to Hollywood to pursue her dreams of making it as an actress.

Alas, Gemma doesn’t have the least idea of how to get an audition or an agent. She needs a survival job. Seeing a “Now Hiring” sign on a door in an alley, she goes inside.

The offices of Somnium look like a regular modest-sized but upscale private medical facility. The company was founded by famed sports psychologist Dr. Katherine Schaefer (Gillian White), who reportedly invented “the science of winning.” Applicable not only to sports but to all fields, this is the concept of making people succeed by getting them to feel they are already successful.

Dr. Schaefer gave up sports medicine to focus on Somnium, which offers a techno-med upgrade on her philosophy. Here, people can pay to be put in pods for a sedated six-week stay where their subconscious minds will be filled with AI scenarios of them achieving their goals. When they awaken, they will have both confidence and strategies to do these things in reality.

There is also the “Cloud Nine” procedure, apparently approved by law enforcement (this is a little fuzzy), where psychotics have a briefer procedure that wipes their personalities and leaves them believing they’ve already accomplished their wildest dreams.

Dr. Schaefer and chief “dream designer” Noah (Will Peltz) fill Gemma in on all this. Gemma’s experience working nights is all that Dr. Schaefer requires her to be the center’s nocturnal “sleep sitter.” This requires Gemma to monitor the clients, who are resting in what look like clear-topped MRI machines, and make sure they are comfortable and undisturbed.

Away from Somnium, Gemma meets manager-type Brooks (Johnathon Schaech), who offers to mentor her. She also reflects on the two-year love affair with hometown boyfriend Hunter (Peter Vack), which Gemma did not want to end.

Once working for Somnium, Gemma gets the sense that her apartment has been invaded and that she’s being watched. She also gets glimpses of a menacing humanoid creature (Bries Vannon) both at Somnium and at home.

Levine is deft, sincere and demonstrates that Gemma is a strong actress in an audition sequence. Vack has easy charm as Hunter, Peltz ably fills his scruffy genius role, and Schaech keeps us guessing as to whether Brooks is as sleazy as his introduction suggests.

But the more we learn about what’s going on at Somnium, the more questions we have. It would be spoilery to go into what those are. Some aspects of the setup make us primed for INCEPTION-like intrigue, wondering if what seem to be mistakes are really hallucinations, but that doesn’t appear to be the intention.

Writer/director Racheal Cain is much more interested in focusing on Gemma’s inner life. Levine’s vital central performance makes this a worthy aspiration. However, minus the science-fiction/horror attributes, Gemma’s journey – romance, the difficulties of making it in L.A. showbiz – is of a kind dramatized and documented with more depth elsewhere. The science-fiction/horror elements have sinister implications, but they aren’t explored enough to have much impact.

SOMNIUM has some tantalizing notions, buoyed up by good acting, but by the end, the pieces are more provocative separately than together as a whole.

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