Review: In Your Dreams is anything but a snooze-fest

When you're a kid, you have so little control over your life. The world is so big, so unknown and unknowable, and you're just being ferried through it by your parents, teachers, other relatives, siblings, whoever. So much is put in place for you, built around you, decided for you -- you largely don't have much say in the matter.

And that's so scary. As is a lot of being a kid. Just like, trying to figure out how the world works, what you actually need to worry about, what's actually a threat to you. Then you find yourself bumping up against thorny, complicated things like love, death, taxes (maybe not taxes). You're always learning, and always learning how much more there is to learn. And, ultimately, that learning never ends. We all spend our whole lives figuring out how to live, and hopefully along the way we land on some decisions we feel happy with.

I came into In Your Dreams in the exact right headspace for it. I don't know why, but today I'm feeling a little weepy, kind of living on the edge of crying. And In Your Dreams pushed me over that edge quite a few times. At the core of the film being such a success is that it really understands what it's like to be a kid, and manages to put you in that frame of mind. Stevie is a twelve-year-old girl who takes after her mother: serious, organized, a planner. And more than anything, she's a fixer. When she sees something wrong or askew, she wants to set it right. Which, as discussed above, is a difficult burden for a kid to bear, when they're largely so powerless in the grand scheme of life.

And Stevie has her sights set on a particularly big problem that she's keen to fix at the moment: her parents' disintegrating marriage. Once a band, Stevie's parents have fallen decidedly out of harmony. Her dad still has his sights set on musical greatness, though he's been working on an album for two years without making much headway. Her mom is more grounded in her thinking, and is on the hunt for a job that's more stable, more lucrative. And would require the family to move to a new city.

Then there's Elliot, Stevie's kid brother who is a bundle of energy and (for her) annoyance. He's always quick to deploy a magic trick, make a joke, pull a prank. He's goofy, sometimes "too-much," and very funny.

This is one of those movies that really just gets kids, and also sibling relationships. Elliot loves bugging Stevie. Stevie is regularly exasperated with Elliot. But man, do they love each other, show up for each other, look out for each other. It's that complicated thing where you can imagine these kids yelling that they hate each other one moment, then just hanging out and playing together the next. That's the way it goes.

And here, they end up united in a magical adventure into the world of dreams. While looking for a book to do a school project on, Elliot ends up stumbling upon a magical tome about the Sandman and the power of dreams. A chant in the book allows the siblings to enter the world of dreams together, where they learn that, by reaching the Sandman, they can have him grant any wish (such as nixing a potential divorce). The rub? Nightmara, another mystical being who is the source of all nightmares, will do anything in her power to turn the dreamscapes into nightmares to prevent the kids from making it to the Sandman.

So, cute and benign dreams don't remain so. A town populated by breakfast food denizens becomes ground zero for a zombie apocalypse. A kiddie amusement park ride becomes a dangerous lava river attraction. Some of the dreams are more banal in their nightmarish qualities: a test Stevie didn't prepare for, appearing in a store naked, going to the dentist. 

By plumbing the depths of the dreamworld, the filmmakers are able to just kind of do whatever they want. It's a license to unfettered creativity, and one they wield well. That said, there is sometimes a sense of "been here, done that," since this is following in the footsteps of other movies that tackle these sort of indelible, incorporeal ideas/things, like Soul, Luck, or (and especially) Inside Out. The latter is an especially ripe point of comparison, as the film's thematic thrust mirrors that of Pixar's classic somewhat closely. But In Your Dreams does its own thing enough to still land solidly, and to occasionally surprise.

There's a lot of great stuff happening here visually, with a lot of creative designs in the dream worlds. The Sandman's sandcastle is depicted as an Escher-esque construction full of shifting blocks and panels, and populated with cute little creatures (since every studio animated movie needs a population of cute little creatures). There's a lot of fun stuff done with scale, bending elements from the film's real-world scenes into twisted, often giant versions of themselves once Stevie and Elliot are back in the dream world.

And the film is also a musical delight, with some great (and random) needle drops (including "Hey Ya!" as an opener??). There's a really beautiful song that Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti (who voice the parents) sing called "The Holding On and the Letting Go" that I can't wait to add to my music library. Maybe a stealth Oscar contender?

Whether you're watching it as a fun adventure or to go on an emotional journey, In Your Dreams is firing on all cylinders, and working on every level. I imagine it'll be useful to parents who have to have a difficult conversation with their kids, but even for kids in more stable family environments, it's a great reminder that nobody is perfect, life is hard, but we can look to each other for stability and safety in the midst of trying times.