Lucid Review – Surrealism, Scissors & Selfhood in a Fever Dream of Feminine Rage | Fantasia fest 2025

Fantasia Film Festival 2025 | Review by Mother of Movies @ vanessasnonspoilers.com

I write as I watch, and let me tell you, my notes for LUCID look like a manifesto scrawled on a dirty napkin during a three-day bender. Making its World Premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival on July 21, this feature debut from co-directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall feels less like a film and more like a raw, exposed nerve you can’t stop poking. It’s a chaotic, often frustrating, but undeniably potent cocktail of 90s grunge, punk-art surrealism, and pure, unadulterated feminine rage. Honestly, it’s the kind of film that makes you appreciate the quiet sanity of your own life.

My mum was asleep before the halfway mark, which I’d normally call a failure, but here it feels like a testament to its hypnotic, fever-dream quality.

Lucid opens with a moment as haunting as it is absurd, a girl presenting a self-portrait with a dead fish crudely nailed to reflect, who she thinks she is. The setup is deceptively simple. We meet Mia (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student getting a brutal dressing down from her professor. Her latest self-portrait is so abstract that, in a bid for interactivity, she “nailed a fish to it… Because you can smell it.” It’s a moment of repulsive genius that perfectly encapsulates the film’s ethos. The professor is unimpressed, demanding she return in one week with something that:

“Shows me who you really are,” something with “heart.”

At its core, Lucid is about expression blocked by pain. Mia’s art isn’t just misunderstood, it’s deemed wrong. She’s critiqued not just by her tutor but by an entire environment that sees “weird” as failure. The visuals support this narrative chaos: dusty sepia tunnels, underwater bokeh, red-washed lighting, and moments of sharp cinematography punctuate a world teetering between coherence and collapse. This sends Mia spiraling down the narrow, artsy tunnels of her city, filmed with a dusty, arty-washed aesthetic where you can almost feel the grit in the air.

A Ballgown in a Bear Trap

The film is a collision of delicate, saturated beauty and rusty, violent danger. Directors Milligan and Fendall, with backgrounds in acting and cinematography, respectively, create a world that is visually stunning and deeply unsettling. The cinematography is sharp and clear one moment, then descends into a woozy, underwater floatiness the next. It ticks off artistic stepping stones, vignettes, bokeh, dyed colour palettes, like it’s on an “aesthetic rave,” as I scribbled in my notes. This visual schizophrenia perfectly mirrors Mia’s internal state as she seeks a shortcut to her soul.

The world of Lucid is steeped in punk-girl energy. Titania, an influencer and Mia’s creative foil, represents the curated version of chaotic femininity. The kind that’s monetized, packaged, and praised. Mia, on the other hand, is the real deal, messy, broke, unhinged, and raw. Her solution comes in the form of a candy elixir, offered up by a witchy figure (played with delicious camp by RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Vivian Vanderpuss) who gives her a few simple rules:

“Go through the door and face your blocks,” “Trust the process,” and most importantly, “Don’t forget to close the door.”

She doesn’t.

Of course, Mia, in a fit of desperation and artistic narcissism, ignores every instruction she is given. What follows is a total immersion into the drug’s effects, a frantic panic of an experience where the pacing becomes erratic, staggered, and rushed. She doesn’t have the money she claimed to have, and her journey to “find herself” quickly turns into a campaign of self-destruction that costs her a job and her grip on reality.

The Ugly, Messy Heart of the Matter

What I appreciate most about LUCID is its unapologetic embrace of the messy and the ugly. The film taps into a deep well of femininity, offering a cloud of advice that feels both profound and fractured. It rages against a world obsessed with making pretty things that make us feel good when the mirror throws back messy ugly things that are just as artificially creative as anything considered beautiful. This isn’t about empowerment through beauty; it’s about finding power in the chaos, the anger, the things we’re told to hide. Mia’s inner anger is made startlingly external when she takes a pair of scissors to a chair, a visceral and cathartic act of destruction.

The sound design and soundtrack are crucial to this immersive chaos. Featuring tracks from artists like Marta Jaciubek McKeever and James Wollam (of Tears for Fears fame), the music is a living part of the film. A recurring folk-rock theme from a fictional 70s band, “Sweetbird,” is woven throughout as a relic of Mia’s family mythology, hinting at the past trauma that bubbles just beneath the surface. As I’ve said before, I’m not into whole songs in films unless they provide relief, not additional confusion.

Here, the music often adds to the fever dream, but it feels intentional, dragging us deeper into Mia’s fractured psyche alongside a powerhouse performance from Ayla Tesler Mabe (Calpurnia), who appears as a Goth Girl and is a real-life guitar god. The score, pulsating, off-tempo, mirrors Mia’s emotional dysregulation. Songs appear in full, something I often dislike, but here they’re essential. Especially the final track, ”If You Love Me“, softly overlays the wreckage with something like grace.

Feminine Chaos and Creative Rebirth

This isn’t trauma as aesthetic, this is aesthetic built from trauma. And when Mia finally explodes her truth, it’s not redemption. It’s defiance. Her art teacher calls her a trainwreck.

After being manipulated, fired, and emotionally gutted, she spirals deeper. Chicken bones in bathtubs. Pins in mannequin heads. A grandmother’s confession on how Mia might have forgotten her childhood trauma. The fish motif? It traces back to her father, a figure shrouded in both nostalgia and bleakness.

“You’re the one who’s supposed to love me!”

She screams, not just to her mother, but to a world that punishes truth when it isn’t pretty.

Final Thoughts: Imperfect and Unforgettable

Lucid doesn’t ask you to understand it. It asks you to feel it. It’s sometimes alienating, often frustrating, and always immersive. Like Mia’s final art piece, it’s not for approval, it’s for release.

Is it perfect? No. Does it try to be? Also no. That’s why it works. Lucid fully commits to its disorienting vision, for better or worse. Who can put a price on finding yourself, even if what you find is a complete wreck?

It’s for the art kids who felt misunderstood, for anyone who has felt the pressure to create something “perfect” and wanted to burn it all down instead. It’s a bold, experimental, and deeply personal film that showcases the exciting new voices of Milligan and Fendall.

You can’t rid yourself of demons to find yourself. You have to let them in to see what they are. It challenges how we define “good” art, interrogates generational silence, and dares to put a fish where the heart should be, because trauma smells, and healing stinks before it sings.

I liked liked it.

Rating for Lucid

4 Fishy traumas out of 5

Produced by: Sublunar Films

• Directors
  • Ramsey Fendall
  • Deanna Milligan
• Writers
  • Ramsey Fendall
  • Deanna Milligan
  • Claire E. Robertson
• Stars
  • Caitlin Acken Taylor
  • Georgia Acken
  • Elaine Thrash Oliveira

Lucid

Director: Ramsey Fendall, Deanna Milligan

Date Created: 2025-07-02 21:30

Editor's Rating:
4

Pros

• Visually arresting and emotionally tactile: LUCID makes use of everything from grunge bokeh to underwater aesthetics, creating a dreamlike but emotionally grounded world that mirrors Mia’s inner state.
• Feminine rage as creative truth: The film taps deeply into generational trauma, repressed memory, and the expectation for women to “make pretty things,” making its themes both timely and timeless.

Cons

• Narrative abstraction may alienate some viewers: The plot’s hallucinatory structure and loose logic can frustrate audiences looking for a clear through-line.
• Relentless emotional tone: The fever-dream pacing and lack of relief can be exhausting, especially for viewers who prefer steadier storytelling rhythms.