Lucid and Every Heavy Thing had their world premieres on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Lucid

Mia (Caitlin Taylor) is an art student without inspiration. When she screws up her self-portrait, she nails a dead fish to it at the last minute and hurries to the studio. Her instructor and most of her classmates are unimpressed. Desperate for ideas to channel her creative energy into, she turns to a psychic’s “medicine” which is meant to induce lucid dreaming. The candy heart drug is meant to be taken in small doses; when Mia starts eating them like the candy they resemble, she starts slipping into waking nightmares that dredge up fragments of repressed memories of her mother.

Lucid has the striking visuals required to make these dream sequences appealing, but the end goal of them is largely obscured by a meandering story. As the film goes on, the sequences of unreality get longer. This intentionally pulls Mia’s story out of its grounding, and by revealing more, Mia’s character becomes more abstract. The film benefits from Caitlin Taylor’s committed performance (she is also credited as a visual artist), and she complements the brash aesthetic. I just wish the filmmakers had more to say about the art that their camera is so focused on. The art world depicted is fairly boilerplate, with the stock character of the authoritative arbitrator of taste who doesn’t understand the appeal of transgressive self-expression.

Mia’s repressed memory backstory, meanwhile, stumbles in its ultimate intention of shedding light on her psyche. While it eventually reveals the story of her parents (a rather predictable story packed in with trauma), it doesn’t add dimension to Mia herself, a character who is otherwise defined by her art and her closed-off nature. In the absence of character depth, we are left solely with the pleasing aesthetic.

Lucid: C+

Every Heavy Thing

Young women are going missing in Hightown City. Their faces are plastered on Missing posters around the town and on the nightly news. Menial office worker Joe (Josh Fadem) finds himself right in the middle of it, when he sees a woman gunned down in the parking lot behind a night club and is confronted by the killer.

When he survives the attack, Joe becomes increasingly anxious about running into the killer again. He develops insomnia, because each time he dreams he sees visions of the eccentric tech billionaire who has been viciously killing women for the thrill of it. Soon, Joe begins losing sight of what is real and what is only in his neurotic mind.

Every Heavy Thing is, in short, an excellent paranoid thriller. Mickey Reece uses his years of indie filmmaking experience to craft a wonderfully winding story that has a breathless energy and visual flare. This is Reece’s most polished effort. His previous films have been shaggy in a way that calls attention to their non-traditional narrative structures. While intriguing, I find this reflexive narrative experimentation distracting, particularly in the case of Agnes, a demonic possession movie that is a few steps shy of greatness.

Every Heavy Thing, meanwhile, is a rather streamlined and straightforward plot, and Reece deploys idiosyncratic and well-rounded characters to fill out the world of this urban psychological thriller. I can see fans of Reece’s earlier films bouncing off this one, simply because it is not engaging in characters’ internal ruminations in the same way. The film is more “traditional,” for lack of a better word. Still, Reece’s senses of humor and style remain at the forefront, and they make the film nothing less than watchable. It doesn’t hurt, too, that a very capable cast is here to channel this humor and personality.

Every Heavy Thing: B

---

As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)