Few non-fiction films pack the affective punch of The Nightmare, which seeks to turn viewers into mirror images of its terror-stricken subjects.

| Feb 29, 2016

Watching this overegged hybrid docu-horror investigation of sleep paralysis, I found myself fighting the urge to snooze.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 11, 2015

Ascher should be making actual horror movies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 8, 2015

While Ascher brings the experiences to life in a way that could conceivably induce nightmares in casual viewers, the potency of these scenes is ultimately diminished by repetition.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 8, 2015

An interesting if ethically dubious documentary.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 8, 2015

Ascher makes a persuasive case that it is the physiological phenomenon of sleep paralysis that has created the nightmare tropes now commonplace in art and literature: they are recognisable, diagnosable symptoms.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2015

While there is a well-maintained sense of lurking discomfort, the gotcha scenes feel a little cheap.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 5, 2015

as 8 people are interviewed about their sleep paralysis, Ascher (himself a sufferer) also reproduces their described experiences on screen, blurring the boundaries between documentary material and vividly, often terrifyingly realised horror tropes.

| Aug 26, 2015

It just isn't as informative as it could be. It's plenty scary, and on that level satisfying. It would be great to see Ascher make a full-on horror feature.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 11, 2015

Ascher plunges us into the actual visions that sleep paralysis creates: the moving silhouette figures, the darkness, the static. The sense of terror is palpable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 5, 2015

Ascher is too content to let repetition of experience take over his film. No sleep studiers or brain experts or anybody else, for that matter, are interviewed.

| Jun 4, 2015

While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, "The Nightmare" declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.

| Jun 4, 2015

Less a straight doc than a psycho-cinematic inquiry into unknown territory, it's really something to see. Whether it's something to believe is another matter.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 4, 2015

This movie should have made me afraid to go to sleep, but in fact I couldn't wait.

| Jun 4, 2015

The Nightmare finds Ascher asserting himself much more boldly as a filmmaker: This is documentary horror, not just a documentary about a horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2015

It's one thing to be tormented. It's another thing to face the grim reality that you're tormenting yourself.

| Original Score: B | Jun 4, 2015

It's all fascinating and eerie, but also a bit repetitive.

| Original Score: B- | Jun 3, 2015

A film that reveals the probes-and-saucers narrative as an of-its-era re-skinning of an even more pervasive phenomenon, one all mental: sleep paralysis.

| Jun 2, 2015

Neither as frightening as a good horror flick nor as enlightening as a straight documentary.

| Jun 1, 2015

As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 31, 2015