evilnids

[evilnids]

Initial thoughts on the movie

The man who kept attacking Sarah is a manifestation of her seeing him in glimpses as she wakes up gasping at the machine. My guess is that for whatever reason this breathing machine is also keeping her in some sort of induced coma

The changes she kept seeing in her “life” were dreams from the coma. I think that she suffered a great trauma from killing the author. It’s unclear if her shooting herself actually happened, since the view of her in the bed at the end doesn’t show her as having any wound dressings and all her hair is intact.

Perhaps Anne had convinced herself she WAS Sarah, calling back to the intro scene of the movie where she looks at the photo on the small table and says “this doesn’t look anything like me”. She fully believes in this moment that she’s Sarah and the photo doesn’t resemble her, when really the reason for that is because she ISNT Sarah. The woman in the photo is Sarah, whom Anne has assumed the identity of due to obsession with the author.

There are a few interesting scenes in the movie to me.

1- the scene where “Sarah” is in a college lecture. The professor is saying something about love being a rush of different emotions, flooding the system. In this scene also, the class is discussing some sort of story in which a fictional character does something drastic for love. Professor seems to be saying that what the character did was a rash act, but sarah disagrees and says that she finds it beautiful. The act in question is never specified but it can be assumed by how nobody else in the class agrees with her, that the action is viewed negatively by most. The last nugget in this scene I want to draw attention to is when the professor actually does the live poll. He says something like “all who agree with miss wells raise your hand”. Nobody raises their hand, including sarah. She is under the impression currently that her name is foster (likely due in part to her delusion of having been Jonathan foster’s wife). So he says “you’re not even on your own side?” So this is interesting to me because it might indicate a subconscious agreement that she doesn’t side with herself for committing the “beautiful” act in the name of love (shooting Jonathan). And I lied there is one more thing that might be relevant: when the professor says that the feeling of love wanes/can’t be maintained forever.

2- when doing her sleep study, sarah is told that dreams are emotions. And the “story” crafted through dreams is the brain playing along with the emotion and making something that fits. Along with the other observation about love being a flurry of emotions flooding the system, it makes me think that the viewer is meant to draw the connection here. The connection is that both concepts heavily center around emotion. The through line would be like this: person is in love -> person’s body is flooded with love chemicals that create emotions -> when unconscious, these strong emotions become the basis for a dream. To me this seems like the movie is very specifically trying to hint at how and why Anne’s mind has crafted this entire scenario during her coma.

3- the last scenes, starting with the part where Anne’s breathing machine regulates her breathing and she drifts back to sleep. While she is going back under, there is that drip from the ceiling that falls on her feet. Then RIGHT after, we get a repeat of the opening sleepwalking scene in the rain. The waking world is thus shown to be affecting her dream world, and the twist of the movie is kind of hard confirmed: the “waking” world that we have known the whole movie has been the dream the whole time. But it feels real to her, and so we as the audience were also shown the world as if it were real.

My prevailing theory about why people and details kept changing in the movie are somewhat influenced by the sleep doctor’s observation that all of the changes are to do with identity. If Anne was already convinced that she was Jonathan’s wife in the waking world, through her obsession, then it may mess with her sense of identity when she kills him and loses consciousness. Her subconscious mind grapples with two identities: her perceived identity as the writer’s wife, and her true identity as Anne. This conflict presents itself through changes in her surname, and through actually seeing fleeting visions of the true Sarah in some of her dreams. She says towards the end of the movie, with surprising steadiness and clarity, that she must have made the sleep doctor guy to “show her what she did”. This indicates to me that she was heavily repressing what happened, and this whole dreamscape is her mind’s way of sorting through and coming to terms with what happened. This is also likely why so many scenes of the movie are so jarringly cut and paced. Her mind is like, trying different things and different scenarios to try and sort through this trauma that she has around the event. The sleep doctor character was created as a place of comfort for her to engage with the event.

The weirdest thing with this movie imo is the specificity of certain things. Why does the dorm neighbor change from one person to another? Why does the therapist sometimes forget her? I don’t quite have an answer for those aside from “brain is having identity crisis, and it is represented by people not knowing who she thinks she is. Also feeling like you always have to second guess who you are.” Who knows, maybe in the waking world, Anne would often have these identity conflicts with those around her.

But yea. The attendant who keeps her breathing machine going is clearly seen as an antagonist and is vilified in her mind likely because he is the one keeping her trapped in the dream, and all of his “calls” are him actually saying those creepy things irl and it seeping into her dream. And all the “dreams” of him suffocating her are actually reality veiled in dreams. She feels the suffocating, she sees or hears him faintly as she wakes (never fully waking), and her mind draws the conclusion that he’s suffocating her. He never tries to kill her any other way than suffocation so there’s that parallel. It’s interesting that in the last “attempt”, he is caught by sleep doctor man and sent off in an ambulance. I guess her brain is trying to take her to a place of comfort after the event, and so it fabricates this.

She doesn’t remember doing things or how she got certain places in her dreams because they are dreams. Events don’t always follow logically in a dream so that tracks

Seeing the real Sarah as a “ghost” near the end likely indicates how she feels about herself truly: as being an outsider looking in on what her body/self should actually be. But her ideal “self” being scared of her true self for what she did, and the dysphoria that comes with that