“Somnium” (2024) follows Gemma Solomon (Chloë Levine), a bright-eyed aspiring actress who left a small town in Georgia and arrived in LA hoping to make it big. In the meantime, she is running low on cash and sees a help wanted sign at Dr. Katherine Shaffer’s clinic, which runs a six-week sleep program and an expedited nine-hour service for those in need. Only earning $600 per week as a sleep sitter and not getting any acting jobs, Gemma starts to get desperate and notice strange things at the clinic and home. Will her adventure end in a nightmare or will all her dreams come true? Writer and director Racheal Cain delivers a stunning feature debut, but the ambiguous ending may leave viewers feeling cheated even if they enjoyed most of the film.

Slightly resembling Mia Goth, Levine carries the entire movie and appears to be a natural. Gemma held the potential to only be a trope and easy to dismiss as the misguided country girl coming to the big city, but Levine and Cain collaborate to shake things up in so many ways: how she reacts to a coworker, Noah Wilkes (Will Peltz) or how she performs in an audition. In the latter, Cain focuses on Gemma without showing anyone else in the room and just allowing their voices to be heard then gradually pans from left to right to show their reaction. Not since “The Last Showgirl” (2025) has an audition scene revealed so much about a character. It is easy to root for Gemma, but her performance seals the deal.

Styled in serial killer glasses and seeming a bit too into his job, Noah seems off. If “Somnium” makes a mistake, it may be because Levine has too much confidence in her audience and does not spell out in detail exactly what Noah is up to. While the gist is obvious, it is unclear how it exactly impacts Gemma and/or others down to the logistics such as how he sneaks people in there and get them to willingly come. If Levine had taken a page from “Coma” (1978), she could have stuck the landing. It was surprising and maybe a little disappointing that Dr. Shaffer (Gillian White) and Olivia (Clarissa Thibeaux) did not play a bigger role considering the clinic’s prominence in the narrative, but it does make some sense since Gemma’s work schedule would not overlap theirs.

Also, Hunter (Peter Vack), her ex-boyfriend, is a major feature in the flashbacks. At a certain point, when it is challenging to discern who is real and who is not, it is harder to know whether to get invested in a storyline, and Hunter ends up being the most dissatisfying of all. What happened at the party? Does not seem to matter.

In the biggest surprise, the thinly sketched Brooks D’Arnault (Johnathon Schaech), a film and television producer, ends up being one of the more interesting characters. Resembling a cross between Mr. Jay Manuel from “America’s Next Top Model” and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from “Blade Runner” (1982), he ends up being an inspirational cheerleader in her corner though he does not give her any easy wins like a role. There is a heartbreaking scene where Gemma misreads the situation, and he sets her straight. After Levine, Schaech handles the script’s ambiguity deftly. The showbiz sequences are more wholesome than expected

“Somnium” is worth watching just to look at. Cain has a strong eye and is clearly meant to be a director. From the opening shot, the overall story gets told in two scenes before any dialogue is uttered, or Levine appears onscreen. It opens in a dark room with guttural noises and an almost indiscernible pale, naked figure billed as the Pale Creature (Bries Vannon) lurking in the darkness before it cuts to a colorful room where pinks and blues dominate the décor. They also happen to be the clinic’s color as well. They are everywhere, and your immediate thought probably will be to ask if Gemma is already in the program, especially since the sounds and figure from the initial scene tend to creep into Gemma’s daily life. Cain does not want to settle for meeting expectations and tries to do more with her story to personify self-doubt. The flashbacks are less stylized. Imagine the usual scene in a movie where a character died and then there are flashbacks to better times. They do not necessarily tell a coherent story, but they offer an idea of what life was like in simpler times.

Most of the denouement is an oneiric scene, which feels more like “Dark City” (1998) than “The Matrix” (1999). Visually, it is a triumph, but Cain’s story needs work. While the sci-fi elements work, and horror visuals are evocative, “Somnium” is ultimately a psychological thriller. It feels worse to avoid a predictable storyline for a dissatisfying one. The sleep clinic metaphor verges on the literal as it explores Gemma’s inability to push beyond her internal brakes and finds herself at sea while achieving her dream. Because it appears that nothing is real, intentional or not, the story suggests that the more of a shell of a human being that you are, the easier it is to disconnect from your past and move forward. If nothing is real and Gemma can overcome the obstacles in her mind and in the physical world, then she can achieve anything. A woman should have played the Pale Creature as the side of Gemma that holds her back from success. Once up close, the Pale Creature feels more generic, not intimately tied to her, so there is little catharsis when she finally faces him. Combined with a jokey zombie reference, it feels like a lack of confidence in the overall story and a desire to snag more viewers, which was unnecessary because otherwise Cain’s film is perfect.

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So Noah was messing with the sleep sitters, but he just leaves them in the clinic while Dr. Shaffer and Olivia are there? Then what? There is too much missing connective tissue. Also, the appearance of the Pale Creature before she starts working there suggests that the entire movie is just a dream, and maybe the movie is just showing what it is like to be a part of Cloud 9, locked in, but believe that you are a success or a failure.