THE STORY – Set in the not so distant future when poor air quality leads to people living mostly virtual lives. Carol is a dissatisfied career mother, struggling to find connection within her marriage to Gary and her child. With the day to day familiarity of their home and lives feeling increasingly claustrophobic, and worried she could be heading towards divorce, Carol leaps at the chance to get her life back on track by signing up for “DreamQuil”, an avant-garde digital wellness retreat. When Carol returns home however, she discovers her family has been living with “Carol 2”, a robot the corporation sent designed to help in her absence, and things take a mysterious and sinister turn.
THE CAST – Elizabeth Banks, John C. Reilly, Juliette Lewis, Sofia Boutella, Kathryn Newton, Lamorne Morris, Toby Larsen & Anna Marie Dobbins
THE TEAM – Alex Prager (Director/Writer) & Vanessa Prager (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 89 Minutes
Science fiction has been warning us against the dangers of artificial intelligence for years, but tech entrepreneurs can’t seem to stop forcing it down our throats these days. Movies have attempted to respond, but mostly in the realm of horror, whether gimmicky horror-comedies like “M3GAN” or hacky exploitation flicks like “Afraid”. Alex Prager’s “DreamQuil” sticks much more closely to hard science fiction, presenting a dark vision of the future in which technology has isolated us to the point that we’re more primed than ever to respond to the same technology’s directly targeted marketing. In other words, it takes place right here, right now, except with even more advanced technology. While her world-building is admittedly impressive, Prager’s attempts to stay one step ahead of the audience result in an ending that feels confused, degrading the potency of her message.
Career woman Carol (Elizabeth Banks) lives in a metropolis with her husband Gary (John C. Reilly) and son Quentin (Toby Larsen). Due to poor air quality, everyone spends their lives indoors, mostly in virtual reality (sound familiar?), where we first meet Carol, having a sexual fantasy with a musclebound hunk in a field of vibrant red poppies. Carol’s world isn’t so vibrant, though. She’s desperately trying to make partner at work, and her relationship with her family has suffered as a result. She and Gary don’t have sex anymore, and Quentin has noticed how distant she’s been. When her best friend Rebecca (Sofia Boutella) tells her about her experience with DreamQuil, Carol shrugs it off at first, noting that the ads promising a renewed sense of self seem like a scam. Rebecca insists that her and her husband’s relationship has improved since she did it, though, and Carol decides that it’s worth a try.
While she undergoes the procedure, the company sends Gary and Quentin a robot assistant that looks just like Carol to help around the house. But when Carol returns home, she learns that the lifelike “Carol 2” (Banks again) has taken such good care of Gary and Quentin that they barely even noticed she was gone. Unnerved by Carol 2’s seeming perfection, Carol starts to worry that something malevolent is afoot, but is the robot really coming for her, or is it all in her head?
At the film’s center, Banks gives a marvelous double turn. Her Carol 2 feels like a piece of uncanny valley visual effects, walking and speaking ever-so-slightly more stiffly than Carol does. She feels recognizably inhuman in a way that feels sinister, because of how close it is to humanity and how devoid of actual human feeling it is. Brilliantly, Banks plays Carol as a shell of a human herself, so warped by the constant demands placed on her that she barely even recognizes herself or her life. Carol, like so many women before her, believed she could have it all but found it nearly impossible to do so. She seems almost resigned to the fact that she can’t have it all at first, but as soon as Rebecca tells her that DreamQuil worked for her, Carol’s perspective changes.
However, despite feeling refreshed after the DreamQuil procedure, she feels jealousy and suspicion take over when she sees how easy Carol 2 makes it all look and how thoroughly Gary and Quentin have accepted her into the family. Reilly’s Everyman screen persona fits the role perfectly: He’s solid, sweet, and boring, the living embodiment of every compromise that Carol has had to make. The two actors build a believably broken relationship that may have started in a loving place but grew stale over the years. Banks plays Carol’s existential crisis over her doppelgänger robot with pitch-perfect precision, carefully delineating how each of Carol 2’s behaviors makes Carol feel insecure, especially regarding her place in the family. It’s yet another fantastic performance from the perpetually underutilized Banks, who keeps picking fascinating projects that don’t quite reach their full potential despite her strong work in them.
Unfortunately, “DreamQuil” fits that description as well. The world Prager builds looks incredible thanks to clever visual effects work and perfectly near-future production design. But many aspects of this world’s technology are too much in the background, leaving the final act feeling underbaked. Prager seems to want to tell a deeper story about our unquestioning over-reliance on technology and how we consumers have all become the real product in the tech space, a potent message with genuine bite. But, perhaps in an effort to shock audiences into receiving the message, she bets everything on a big reveal about the truth of DreamQuil that doesn’t fully pay off until an end-credits sequence that only fully works if you’ve been paying close attention—a bold move, but one that ends the film on a frustrating note.
It’s a pity, because the world of “DreamQuil” is so richly imagined that more time spent developing Prager’s ideas wouldn’t have been an imposition on the audience. Instead, it’s a good-looking, well-acted sci-fi thriller that takes a big swing at the end and misses. Ah, well. Even these days, we can’t have it all.
