Dream Eater 

(dirs. Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm, Alex Lee Williams)

By: Dave Hughes

Eli Roth has built a reputation for pushing audiences to the edge. From the flesh-eating dread of Cabin Fever to the holiday carnage of Thanksgiving, he has always understood how to crawl under an audience’s skin. So when a film manages to disturb Roth, it is worth paying attention. Serving as an executive producer on Dream Eater, Roth championed its release in theaters and helped fuel early buzz. The film delivers intense, nightmarish terror, but it leans heavily on familiar genre DNA, which makes it struggle to carve out its own place in the modern horror landscape.

Dream Eater centers on Alex, a man suffering from frightening episodes of parasomnia (a dissociative sleep disorder). His girlfriend, Mallory, attempts to understand his condition, and with the aid of a social worker, begins to document these occurrences over a weekend getaway. The terrifying events unfold through Mallory's found footage lens, providing an intimate, albeit terrifying, account of their weekend as the line between his conscious and unconscious life quickly blurs.

The film’s tension is anchored by Alex Lee Williams's(Escape the Night) compelling portrayal of Alex, who expertly captures the terrifying dissociative state bordering on sleep and wakefulness. As the weekend unfolds, his increasing psychological fracture is chronicled, yet it is the menacing stillness of his presence, often looming in the frame's negative space, that generates true horror. Mallory Drumm(Becky) serves as the audience’s lens. Her growing terror is expertly conveyed through the unsteady camera work and the sound design, where her deep, trembling breaths become the agonizing soundtrack to Alex's nightmares.

It is impossible to watch Dream Eater without feeling the shadow of films like Paranormal Activity (2007), where terror unfolds through cameras in a domestic setting. While this technique can be incredibly unsettling (exploiting the violation of safety in a house), Dream Eater leans into the format's conventions without innovation. From the predictable cadence of the jump scares to the presence of Mallory’s camera, the film never successfully leverages the found footage trope for a new emotional or thematic purpose. Ultimately, this reliance on familiar genre DNA prevents Dream Eater from establishing the visual or structural identity necessary to stand out in the saturated modern horror landscape.

For the first large chunk of the movie, Dream Eater settles into a monotonous cycle of escalating, yet telegraphed, jump scares and predictable tension beats. This structure (where Alex suffers an episode, Mallory questions him, and Alex claims amnesia) is punctuated by his repeated, cryptic references to a mysterious "him." By the time the final reveal regarding the identity of this figure arrives late in the film, the audience has been so narratively detached by the tedious pacing that the payoff feels entirely unearned and disappointing. Alex’s psychological fracture remains terrifying throughout the film, yet the underwhelming rationale behind the horror forces the audience to forget the fear and question if the tedious journey was worth the shallow conclusion.

Target Score: 3/10 -  Dream Eater benefits from a compelling foundation, anchored by the strong performances of Alex Lee Williams and Mallory Drumm. However, the film's structural shortcomings, characterized by the monotonous repetition of scares and the reliance on familiar genre DNA, quickly compromise its potential.