Interview with Racheal Cain, Director of ‘Somnium’

Racheal Cain’s Somnium is a horror film set at a mysterious sleep clinic that promises to make dreams real. Its protagonist, Gemma (played by Chloë Levine), pieces together reality from dreams, hallucinations, and waking life, with the story flashing back to Georgia alongside the clinical present. Cain spent thirteen years making the film, and in that marathon timeline she discovered something more unnerving than any nightmare her movie could conjure: “Success is actually scary. The thing that we want, giving ourselves permission to go ahead and do that is actually the oddly scary thing.”

This wasn’t an easy realization. Cain started writing the script in 2011 after her “first heartbreak, my first love.” In her words, she “set out to write a story to figure out how to deal with all of that emotion. Art comes from a lot of pain sometimes.” She filmed the Georgia flashback sequences in 2018 with partial funding, then spent four years rewriting the entire story around those fixed scenes while raising the rest of the budget.

“It was a really unique way of writing, being tethered to a storyline and writing something around that,” she says. The process forced her to build a narrative around fragments, much like Gemma, who is constantly trying to figure out what’s real at the Somnium clinic.

The clinic itself was born from Cain's observations of contemporary American culture. "I was really inspired by all of the med spas out there and all of the like, you're just constantly, there's ads constantly in your face, of like, you're not good enough, like you need plastic surgery." Early drafts featured a literal plastic surgery clinic, but "the plastic surgery wasn't allowing me to go deep enough. Once it shifted from that kind of clinic to this dream clinic that can totally change your world, that unlocked a whole lot more potential."

Cain drew from her own experience with manifestation culture. "I grew up with my parents preaching the secret and the power of creating your own reality, and so that was a really fun thing to play with this clinic." The connection became visceral when she moved to Los Angeles and encountered the city's self-help industrial complex firsthand. "I was on this kick of listening to affirmational tapes, and I put one on, and I was like, this is truly one of the creepiest things I've ever heard. Like you are where you need to be, and like, tricking your mind to create this reality. It was so creepy."

That creepiness runs through Somnium, which Cain designed to exist "in a reality that's like one degree off from our reality." She used oversized props and temporal anachronisms to create subtle disorientation. "I just kind of always wanted to make people feel a little bit off balance, like they don't really know where they are."

When directing Chloë Levine through these liminal states, Cain insisted on treating every moment as equally real. "When you're in the dream, you're believing it's real. So I didn't never really like, let myself think, oh, this is a dream, so we can do this. It was kind of all played straight."

Somnium forced Cain to confront her own relationship with self-examination. "This whole process was like looking in the mirror and not being afraid to see my flaws. I think a lot of filmmakers and artists have a really hard time with that." She's developed an unusual comfort with criticism. "Bad reviews actually don't really bother me, because I'm like, I know it's not a perfect movie, and I'm okay with that. I think the best idea should always win, whether it's mine or some random person's."

This self-awareness extends to how she views success itself. "I was definitely evolving as a human being throughout that period, reconciling with all of the sacrifice and realizing that I had to come to terms with all the things that scared me and held me back." The fear, she discovered, wasn't failure but achievement. "For so long, so many of us just get stuck because we think we need someone else to come and tell us it's okay to make the thing. You're allowed. You have permission, but no one's ever going to come and do that for you."

Learning to give herself permission became a recurring challenge. "That was something I had to learn multiple times. It's not just a given. It's not like a one time thing. It's like sometimes a monthly thing, like, let's keep going with what we have. And that's what it comes down to, is just looking around at what you have and making the most of it."

Now that Somnium exists in the world, Cain finds herself surprised by her own reaction. "I'm surprised at how chill and the same I feel. It seems really different than I thought it would." She points to a scene in the film where Gemma appears on a talk show, finally achieving the visibility she sought. "I think that happens to a lot of people, where they stumble into success and that can really mess you up. It's really terrifying to me."

The long timeline of her own project protected her from such disorientation. "It's been such a long period that I'm just embracing it, but it's also like, I'm ready to do something else too."

When asked what she hopes audiences take from Gemma's journey, Cain returns to the insight that kept her going through over a decade of work: "If you can root yourself in this moment, which really is the only thing that's real, fear can't really live there, because fear kind of lives in the mind. And if you can do that, then you can do the scary things."

Somnium warns about the side effects of making dreams real, but Cain has found a way to minimize the damage: give yourself enough time to grow into whoever you need to be to handle what you've always wanted. In a culture obsessed with overnight success, she's made a case for the decade-plus commitment. The real horror isn't that dreams don't come true. It's that they do, and we might not be ready when they arrive.