The Horror Show
The Omnipotence of Dreams
by James Travers
My name is P.J. Griffin and for the past 29 years, I've been on a mission to see every anthology-style film ever made. This is a completely accurate statement; from the day I was born, this quest began. There was a ceremony and swords and everything. It was epic. So, in line with this mission, I found myself intrigued by the brief synopsis of The Omnipotence of Dreams. It seemed to be of the multiple-story format and looked interesting. I purposely avoided reading anything more about the film and dove right in. But how was it? What did I think? Well... let's look a little closer.
The film opens with a brief, old-timey text introduction before opening to its first scene. Revealing the film to be partially animated, the audience is shown a green screen pub by the name of Murphy's. Two well-dressed businessmen enter the establishment and spend a fair amount of time complaining about their lives. They complain about their wives, their kids, their salary. This banter catches the attention of a disheveled man in old dingy attire who laughs off their whining. He tells them that his life has been the real definition of tragedy and he is the one who knows true pain and woe. The two men call his bluff and offer to pay him a tidy sum if he tells them his story. So he does. And it gets really weird and random.
The first thing I will say about The Omnipotence of Dreams is that the film itself feels like a student project early into the year. That isn't even my attempt at being clever and calling it bad, it specifically has that student-made aura to it. The two businessmen, for example, appear decades apart in age and yet talk as if they are peers and about “back in their day” etc. One of them doesn't look old enough to vote but talks about having a son in tenth grade. In the brief time I was in film school, I remember these types of situations. You take who you can get and often refuse to rework the scenarios to fit who you have.
The film is very ambitious, but intention alone only gets a project so far. The animation is quite cheap and makes the overall experience more unintentionally uncomfortable than creepy. It wants to do so much and has so little and doesn't really know how to make the dollar stretch. The frame story is an interesting concept, but the meat of the movie goes too grand. The man's life story involves the stock market crash and warfare and bootlegging, but it's all thrown together with low grade animation that would be fine if the film were at least memorable.
I love low-budget films and believe that there is an air of charm to bad acting, but in The Omnipotence of Dreams it's all mixed into a strong commitment to making the film as animated as possible which makes the film sacrifice authenticity for a quick attempt at something that looks more impressive. In the end, I would have preferred the movie ease off the animation and focus more on just telling a story with interesting characters. Don't get me wrong, I love animated films and always want to see more of it utilized in the horror world. But this style is more distracting than it is fun, and I would have just as soon done without it.
All in all, I will call The Omnipotence of Dreams a commendable attempt but overall a messy experience. It isn't pretentious at all and seems to at least be having some fun with itself, so I won't criticize it across the board. The powers that be took a lot on and it turned out to be more than they could chew. I wasn't particularly bored with the film and that's always a compliment. I'd like to see more from those involved but with more means and focus to guide the higher brow ideas through. It tries to be a spectacle, a dramatic horror film. Instead it feels like an early attempt at something that may take shape in the future.
P.J. Griffin, HMS
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