TL;DR: Parasomnia is a low-budget supernatural horror movie with a strong lead performance, some decent imagery and a few ideas I really liked - unfortunately, the movie gets a little too tangled in its own mythology, so while there is a good horror movie buried in here, it doesn't always know when to stop explaining itself.
Plot
After her friend vanishes, Riley must confront the demon from her night terrors that may have crossed into reality, while facing her own tragic past.
Riley Is the Best Part of the Movie
Jasmine Mathews as Riley is probably the best thing I can say about this one, as she puts a good performance into a movie that probably does not deserve it, giving her character this tired, uneasy quality that makes it easy to believe she has spent years dealing with something most people would have absolutely no idea how to handle.
Her night terrors aren't simply switched on whenever the movie needs a scare, either - they have become part of her daily life, with Riley following a strict routine around sleep because she knows what can happen when she lets her guard down, so her character actually has a history - you can see that this has affected the way she lives, and Mathews does a good job of making Riley frightened, while also making those watching feel it too.
The movie also has this nice, murky look that suits the subject - director James Ross II keeps a lot of the locations dark and enclosed, and while some of the darkness does make things harder to see than I would have liked, but it also fits the idea that Riley can't always work out what is actually happening around her, so it fits the theme well.
The nightmare sequences are where the movie gets much more interesting though - there are some properly strange images, including masks, disturbing figures and an unpleasant obsession with human eyes, while the hellish maze-like environments give the dreams a feeling of their own rather than making them look like random scenes thrown in between the dialogue.
For a low-budget horror movie, some of this stuff looks surprisingly good too - you can see the budget in places, but I actually prefer that to a movie desperately trying to disguise what it cost to make, and the creature design has some good moments too, although I never found the main demon particularly memorable - it looks OK, but once the movie starts showing too much of it and explaining what it is, some of that nightmare quality disappears.
The Mythology Gets in Its Own Way
This is where Parasomnia starts losing its grip a bit - the movie has some interesting ideas about sleep, trauma, fear and being trapped inside something you cannot control, but it keeps adding more mythology until the point where you are spending more time trying to actually remember the rules the movie has setup, where the explanations here don't always make the movie a more rewarding watch - sometimes they just make something that was creepy and mysterious feel like a puzzle that needs solving.
The third act in particular tries to bring the different pieces together and there is a clever idea underneath it all, but by that point I had become more interested in whether I understood the mechanics than whether Riley was going to get through it, which is a shame because the personal side of the story is fairly interesting - Riley's past gives the horror some emotional weight, and I would have happily spent more time with the consequences of what happened to her rather than getting another explanation about the supernatural world.
There are some scares attempts here, too, but I wouldn't call Parasomnia particularly frightening in that department - it is much better at being unpleasant than terrifying, with some bloody imagery and situations that are uncomfortable to watch, but the sleep paralysis angle could have been used to much greater effect.
James Ross II clearly has imagination - this is his feature debut, and I can see the filmmaker he might become because the nightmare sequences show a willingness to get weird rather than simply copying another supernatural horror movie, but the biggest issue is restraint, because there are moments where three different ideas seem to be fighting for space when one of them could have carried the scene perfectly well.
The ending is where it tries to tie Riley's history and the supernatural threat together, and I did not mind the attempt to make earlier events look slightly different in hindsight, but I just wanted the emotional payoff to be a better, because the movie had done enough work establishing what Riley has been through that the conclusion should have landed with more force.
Final Thoughts
Parasomnia is an interesting horror debut that has better ideas than execution, and I just wish the film had trusted its creepiest ideas a little more and explained them a lot less.
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