Choosing between lucid reality or dreams can be a difficult decision to make when you lack social skills and prefer to live secluded in a bubble from the rest of the world that has been inconsiderate of your problems and feelings.

Lucid presents the story of Zel (Laurie Calvert), an introverted young adult that, due to his own anxiety and the reason why he’s on a prescription, has no developed social skills and doesn’t know how to talk to his crush. His house, just as much as his life, is a mess. His mother decides to cut off his financial support and Zel is forced to get a job that doesn’t motivate him. One day he runs into his neighbor Elliot (Billy Zane), a former therapist to whom he tells his problems and, as a result of wanting to continue practicing his profession, decides to help Zel overcome his fears by writing his dreams down in a diary. But, before working on himself, he must stop taking prescription pills to remove the blindfold and start dreaming to start believing. Can this help Zel overcome his problems or will he fall down and become a danger to himself and others?

Visually speaking, the whole film is a lucid dream of beautiful and aesthetic frames—most of the scenes are darkly lit with artificial lighting which makes the bright colors look dead while darker colors are more alive than Zel’s dreams. It lets you appreciate everything happening around in the background and all the details from the setting. It may seem like there’s nothing much to see around the characters but whenever Zel is dreaming there are a lot of details that make you question if he’s asleep or awake. The music is a very interesting soundtrack— it has an eerie electronic vibe that immerses your mind into the film and the mysterious mind of Zel.

So much praise for the artistic part of Lucid can only lead us to complimenting the story but this isn’t the case.  Lucid plays around the concepts of reality versus fiction but it never delivers a solid result— it’s as if it kept walking in circles inside a corn maze, got lost and suddenly found the exit by cutting through it with a chainsaw. It is a good idea that got lazily executed to the point it gets a little pretentious with its plot and its characters, and each part gets confusing because you can’t seem to connect the dot— not as confusing like Inception, it’s more of a Sucker Punch mixed up what-the-freak confusion. The characters aren’t bad, each fit in stereotype the visual profile of how an introvert may see others, but they’re lifeless and sometimes absorb each other’s essences making the rest get lost by the presence of another figure.

Lucid walks up to the playground, climbing all the way to top of a slide, just to go down right into a box full of sand, leaving you dry and itchy making you think it was a good idea but failed your expectations. A little more development into the past of Zel’s character could’ve helped into understanding his origins instead of making it look like the story of a grown man struggling to live his life after the silver spoon was taken out of his mouth.

7 OUT OF 10 DREAM DIARIES