​​Dream Story

by Hope Madden

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It takes chutzpah to choose to follow Stanley Kubrick, but Florian Frerichs is undeterred. His Dream Story, based on the same novel as Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, mines the sordid tale of high society orgies for a few different ideas.

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We are still focused on the bored, rich, and horny, though.

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Set in Berlin, where it does feel at home, Dream Story follows Jakob (Nikolai Kinski), a wealthy doctor. After putting their precocious, opera loving son to bed, Jakob and his wife Amelia (Laurine Price) reminisce about a recent night out.

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When Amelia admits to a powerful, unfulfilled longing for a stranger, Jakob’s marital contentment begins to feel like foolishness.

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What’s a guy to do but visit a secret, cloak-and-mask orgy?

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While most of the story beats echo those from ’99, there are some clear differences. Dream Story is indifferent to Kubrick’s themes of the grotesque heartlessness of the wealthy. In Eyes Wide Shut, the rich are so accustomed to treating everyone as a commodity and everything as a transaction that they’ve lost their humanity.

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Frerichs is more concerned with the “dream” in Dream Story (a title derived from the English translation of writer Arthur Schnitzler’s original title). Upon hearing of his wife’s unsatisfied lust, it’s as if Jakob wakes from the dream of a loving bond. Now, insecure and hurt, he wanders as an almost childlike outsider looking to be a bad boy.

Frerichs amplifies the dreamy quality of the film with fanciful moments—Jakob’s operatic fantasies and instances when he breaks the fourth wall, for example. There’s also a trippy animated sequence to deepen the spell.

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Frerichs, who adapts Schnitzler’s 1929 novella Traumnovelle with frequent collaborator Martina van Delay, also enlists bloody imagery. This he does less for the sake of horror and more to signal Jakob’s own mortality. Frequent callbacks to the death of a patient in Act 1 keep the doctor’s preoccupation with his own morality top of mind. His quest to do something debauched, springs from a sudden sense of all he’s wasted being faithful to a woman who may not even want him.

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Dream Story is, in the end, more of a love story. In carving out so clearly a new path with the material, Frerichs delivers a whole new reason to watch. 

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