Dare to Dream

I'd kill for a good night's sleep: Jonas Chernick in Lucid. Photo Sean Garrity. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Sean Garrity recently travelled to the Kingston Film Festival to introduce Lucid, his latest movie, and sit on a panel about genre filmmaking. “That’s a panel I never thought I’d be on,” admits the Winnipeg filmmaker, whose work up until now has been hard to slot. Garrity, 39, started his film career with documentaries, offbeat comic pieces and lyrical, experimental shorts. His first feature film, Inertia (2001), was the exact opposite of a rom-com, an elliptical ensemble piece about relationships in various stages of confusion and collapse.

Lucid is a psychological thriller with a twist ending, a genre on the rise in mainstream film since The Sixth Sense surprised everyone at the box office in 1999. Garrity’s indie habits die hard, though; for every genre marker he sets up, he knocks another over. Lucid relies on off-kilter dread rather than outright horror, dallies with sexual awkwardness rather than noir sexiness and always preserves a thin, dark edge of comedy.

Clinical psychologist Joel Rothman (Winnipegger Jonas Chernick, who co-wrote the script) is red-eyed and emotionally ragged, stumbling through the advanced stages of sleep deprivation. He’s incapable of falling asleep in his bed, but has a knack for nodding off while driving home from work. His wife has gone AWOL after catching him in an act of adultery — an event presented with embarrassed anti-eroticism in the film’s first scene. Meanwhile, Joel’s nine-year-old daughter, Jenny (Brianna Williams), is unhappy and resentful. She’s taken to calling Joel by his first name, just to bother him. (“Why not Daddy? Or Father?” asks Joel. “I’d settle for Pappy.”)

Joel’s snarky boss (Ross McMillan) is threatening to transfer him out of town, and his post-traumatic stress disorder group is, well, stressed. Meek shut-in Chandra (Michelle Nolden), disaffected addict Sophie (Lindy Booth) and Victor (Callum Keith Rennie), possibly the angriest man on Earth, are starting to swap delusions. One of Victor’s paranoid visions — that the same person seems to pop up again and again as Victor moves through the city — is spreading to the women. Joel’s professional response involves staring helplessly at his patients and yelling, “No, no, no!” in a jag of insomniac exasperation. Soon, Joel starts hallucinating, too.

Garrity worked with a $2-million budget, up from $500,000 for Inertia. “Everyone else, especially the people from Toronto, thought it was tiny, but I thought it was huge. I felt like a millionaire,” he says. “Well, I was a millionaire.” All that cold cash allowed him to hire some name Canadian actors, like Nolden (Show Me, Men With Brooms), Booth (Dawn of the Dead) and Rennie (Falling Angels and Last Night), who all got on board with Garrity’s interest in improvisation. Rennie, in particular, seems to have a ball with his character’s perpetual — and frequently very funny — state of fury.

Lucid director Sean Garrity. Photo Yumiko Sakamoto. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

As for Joel, Garrity knew that only Chernick (who starred in Inertia) could play him. Chernick proved he was ready for anything by dropping his clothes for the first scene. Inertia also opened with a shot of Chernick in full-frontal mode. “It’s like bookends,” jokes Garrity. “We thought we’d turn him around this time, so you can see both sides.”

Chernick’s ease with nude scenes might explain why he was named one of Canada’s “Reel Men” in the March issue of Flare. But what really sets him apart is his emotional nakedness. Unlike the standard stoic leading man, Chernick fearlessly explores neediness, neurosis and free-floating anxiety.

Chernick also mines Joel’s talent for screwing up in his personal and professional life. Garrity admits that some of the film’s investors were anxious about a potentially unlikeable main character. Garrity was certain, however, that Chernick could pull it off. “That face, those big blue eyes, that dorky charisma,” says Garrity, who has known Chernick for seven years. “I was so confident that people would be on side with Jonas that the question became, ‘Just how bad can we make him be?’”

Garrity spent much of his twenties away from his hometown, travelling, studying film at York University and living in Argentina and Japan. After an 11-year absence, Garrity returned to Winnipeg in 1997 to start his film career. Partly, the choice was creative: after listening one night to Argentinean friends share childhood memories, Garrity thought, “If I want to work with these kinds of deep connections, I’ll have to go back to where I grew up and explore those stories.”

“Plus,” he adds, with the pragmatism of a low-budget filmmaker, “When I’m making movies, I can use my mother’s car.”

Garrity shot some of Lucid in an empty high rise in the downtown core. “It’s Winnipeg: there’s no shortage of abandoned buildings.” Vacant military housing in the city’s suburban south end — the army had just relocated, leaving 260 unused buildings — stands in for Joel’s neighbourhood.

There is something eerie about these locations, a sense of loss and isolation that is cranked up as Lucid’s stylish surfaces start to crack. Garrity and Chernick’s script is full of little things that itch at the back of your mind. Why does Victor think he’s being shadowed by CSIS? Why is Chandra convinced that the city is shrinking? What’s with that weird cartoon Jenny is watching? Working in the often overdone arena of the psycho-thriller, Garrity wanted to remain conscious of the viewer. “You make a contract with the audience,” he suggests. “You say, ‘We’ll give you clues, enough clues, and you can play detective.’ And you really have to give them some kind of emotional payoff for that work.”

Lucid’s conclusion delivers that payoff, probably because heading towards it, the plot is driven by character and feeling rather than engineered to illustrate some fancy trick — as in the increasingly forced oeuvre of Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. The psycho-thriller genre may demand a perception-bending ending, but Garrity’s indie instincts tell him that everything leading up to it matters just as much.

Lucid is now playing in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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