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No Room to Breath: LUCID and the High Cost for Creativity. 

By: Professor Horror

 

Deanna Mulligan and Ramsey Fendall’s LUCID (which screened at Fantasia Fest 2025) is an experimental film about experimental art with a bit of a punk rock backbone. Shot on gritty 35 and 16mm film, it follows disheveled, burnt-out art student Mia (Caitlin Taylor) as she struggles to create something meaningful while working the bottom rung at a greasy chicken shop. Her classmates and teacher dismiss her, and the world around her feels gray, flat, and draining. In the beginning, the film itself depicts her life, as the grainy cinematography mirrors her sense of stasis and offers us up a visual language of fatigue and disconnection.

                                          

 

However, Mia’s desperation for creative breakthrough leads her to a strange solution: a heart-shaped candy made from Tibetan snowdrops, courtesy of a friend’s witchy godmother (Vivian Vanderpuss). While a nibble is supposed to help access blocked creativity, Mia definitely bites off more than she can chew, so the nightmares soon begin. Her dreams and waking life blur together, and she must defeat what is blocking her (literally and creativity) to pass through a mysterious red door.

                                        

 

The dream sequences are chaotic, layered collages that shift and stutter like a mind unraveling, and the soundscape mirrors this with muffled voices, discordant tones, and ambient noise that feels slightly off from reality. I feel the film draws inspiration from titles like Skinamarink (and early David Lynch) but LUCID still manages to stay very much its own thing. While the film flirts with the idea that creativity can be chemically unlocked, its real heart lies elsewhere. LUCID is about the painful mismatch between artistic ambition and emotional capacity. Mia’s creativity is not blocked by lack of talent, but by exhaustion, trauma, and a society that gives her no room to process either. If she had time, stability, or space to breathe, she might not need magical pills at all. Her enemy isn’t a lack of ideas…it’s everything else.