Susan Granger's review of "IN DREAMS" (DreamWorks)
How awful can a movie starring Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr., helmed by writer/director Neil Jordan be? "In Dreams" plumbs new depths of malevolence, becoming an early candidate for the Worst Movies of 1999 category. Annette Bening plays a New England children's book author who is tormented by weird, terrifying dreams. She's a psychic who can see things before they happen, and she doesn't know what to make of images of an almost surreal underwater town, mutilated bodies, and a mysterious man with long hair who leads a trusting child through an apple orchard to her death. Of course, no one believes her - not the cops, not even her often-absent airline pilot husband, Aidan Quinn. After a couple of suicide attempts, she winds up in a mental institution, where she occupies the same room that Robert Downey Jr. once lived in. He's a maniacal murderer whose abused childhood included being left chained to a bed by his mother when their town was being flooded to make a reservoir. Stephen Rea is Bening's psychiatrist who tries to make sense of her ramblings. Robert Downey Jr. overacts so dreadfully that one wonders why the L.A. judge decided to release him from his jail sentence temporarily last year to finish this film, which is based on Bari Wood's novel "Doll's Eyes." The singular redeeming feature is its eerie, underwater imagery. Jordan built a small town and then flooded it in the same Baja, California, water tanks where James Cameron shot "Titanic." On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "In Dreams" is a tedious, ludicrous 2. Adding insult to injury, the Andrews Sisters' W.W. II ditty, "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," is used on the sound track to signal impending doom.
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