Alex Prager’s debut “DreamQuil” film of whip-smart design that ends up with little to say. Its retro-futuristic setting draws heavily from the 1950s but combines numerous contemporary concerns, resulting in a “Stepford Wives”-esque saga that, though rendered with a deft artistic hand, rarely draws real meaning from its many disparate parts. It concerns data mining, predatory wellness schemes, feminist liberation, artificial intelligence, environmental anxieties and a whole lot more, but rarely does it sublimate these themes into something coherent.
The film was born from conversations between the director and her sister/co-screenwriter, Vanessa Prager, during the 2020 pandemic, and it features a world at a standstill (not to mention, crafted with wonderful miniatures). Rampant air pollution has trapped everyone indoors, and forces them to wear gaudy masks in the visage of human mouths on the few occasions they can venture outside. Carol (Elizabeth Banks) is a married mother and careerwoman dissatisfied with her life, though she can seldom locate the exact cause of her emotional malaise. Maybe it’s her adolescent son Quentin (Toby Larsen) expressing his dislike of her with hilarious bluntness, or maybe it’s because her husband Gary (John C. Reilly) — who teaches poetry over video calls — can’t bear to touch her anymore.
This is a world rife with Virtual Reality — one of the many modern adaptations to life indoors — and we first meet Carol as she lives out a detailed fantasy of sleeping with a digital hunk. For Carol, escape seems to be the only avenue to even temporary contentment or connection, since her domestic life involves mundane chores and difficult emotional obligations on top of her high-powered job. She’s a modern woman, sure, but the echoes of post-World War II domestic expectations still linger over her, making the movie’s hybrid designs all the more potent.
During one of her remote hangouts with her best friend Rebecca (Sofia Boutella) — with whom she “meets” at a bar in a digital 3D space — Carol learns of a wellness process known as DreamQuil, which claims to alter women’s moods and fix their problems by making them re-live their deepest traumas. The company’s CEO, played by Kathryn Newton, can be glimpsed on numerous news screens singing the program’s praises, further convincing Carol to take a much-needed trip to their headquarters and get sorted out, while an android helps Gary and Quentin by cooking and cleaning. However, upon waking from the procedure, she returns home to find her husband and son living with a spitting image of herself, the robotic, obedient and eager Carol 2 (also played by Banks), setting off an intriguing domestic dramedy.
On the surface, “DreamQuil” features some alluring aesthetic ideas, from bright, pristine outfits and production design that obscure a lurking gloominess, to emotional audiovisual sensibilities typical of daytime soap operas. If the film is going to be for and about women, then its choice to trade in the language created “for” and “about” them by corporate America in the mid-20th century is a tongue-in-cheek delight. However, this send-up never blooms into full-blown social satire, despite gesturing in its direction. Despite Carol’s fears of replacement — and her having to face the idea that feminine perfection means never failing or complaining as a wife, mother, or woman in the (remote) workplace — the movie seldom evolves beyond the surface appearance of these conceptual problems. That Carol fears and envies Carol 2 (who Banks plays with exaggerated, steely aplomb) is a great starting point that goes nowhere with any urgency, as the soap opera sensibilities soon congeal into light situational comedy, with not only thematic resets to the status quo, but at one point, quite a literal reset too, courtesy of some futuristic tech.
“DreamQuil” is, unfortunately, a hard film to get invested in, simmering at a lukewarm dramatic temperature for much of its runtime, including through its predictable plot twists. It seldom varies in tone, intensity, or storytelling mode in ways that might force its confrontation of the modern world, and modern technology, to take on interesting new dimensions. Unfortunately, despite the story being aimed at emotional discovery and self-actualization — especially in moments of constraint — what you see when “DreamQuil” begins is pretty much what you get by the time the credits roll.
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