Movies: Long Dream

Long Dream isn’t a great movie, but it takes an intriguing idea and plays it out in a way that makes me curious for a more ambitious adaptation of the same source material. The movie was inspired by a manga by Junji Ito, he of Uzumaki and Gyo, and was directed by the same man who gave us a filmed version of Uzumaki, Higuchinski. The director’s affinity for the original author/artist’s ideas inspired him to do good work on a tiny budget — the whole thing’s a direct-to-video product and it shows — but this feels like a test run for something far larger.

Tucked away inside one of the wards of a private medical clinic is a patient with a most unusual illness: he’s having dreams which feel progressively longer. One night’s dream might feel to him like several days in real life, or even a week. Eventually the dreams grow to months, years, decades, and even more — and the patient begins to undergo ghastly changes, a by-product of spending centuries in a kind of alternate time. Then one of the other doctors in the clinic hits on the idea of artificially inducing the same state in someone else … for instance, himself, as a way to reunite himself with his dead girlfriend, whom he imagines is waiting just behind the wall of sleep.