In Dreams

Every bit as haunting and entrancing as the Big O's ballad of the same name, but nowhere near as enjoyable, the truly terrifying In Dreams seems to finally mark the end of Neil Jordan's flirtations with anything resembling commercial mainstream cinema.

Gothic, brooding, malicious and deeply disturbing, the film is a dark-beyond-description thriller-chiller which heralds an apparent return to the more fevered style of Angel and Company of Wolves.

Box-office success on a Michael Collins scale is completely out of the question, but Dreams is a superb and searingly powerful work that will continue to be watched in the decades to come. Hitchcock might have admired it.

Annette Bening gives a superb lead performance as a housewife haunted by horrific reoccuring dreams which - it slowly becomes apparent - are linked in some way to a sequence of grisly murders.

One of them concerns a young girl being led through an apple orchard, and when the dead body of her daughter Rebecca is discovered in the reservoir, the suspicion forms in Bening's mind that her brain is being invaded by the local slasher. The suspicions are confirmed when she foresees her husband's murder, which promptly comes to pass despite her impassioned forewarnings to a sceptical shrink (the ever-excellent Stephen Rea).

At this point, the film begins a gradual descent into schlock-horror clicheland and piles on the psychodramatics as thick as possible, with nods to Psycho, Silence Of The Lambs and The Shining - it's fairly familiar territory, but Jordan's typically inventive cinematography creates the impression of something original. Self-inflicted wrist-slashings and other such delights provide the main course during the film's unremittingly unpleasant second half, which drives Bening over the edge of psychosis and seems determined to take the audience with her.

Clichés abound, then, but Jordan's claustrophobic direction and innate sense of the gothic serve to lift In Dreams above the level of most genre fluff. Individual scenes are vividly enchanting and darkly poetic, with woodlands, briars, angel wings and other related symbols of the great primal gothic nightmare much in evidence - and if the narrative drive of the tale leads nowhere we haven't visited before, the style and mood of the film are fairly irresistible.

In Dreams is not one of Jordan's classic creations, but even when operating below par, the guy is incapable of making a boring or bland movie. Another worthy addition to one of the most impressive CVs in contemporary cinema.