Review: The Nightmare Gallery

Director: Gene Blalock

Screenplay: Jhan Harp and Rob Stith

Year: 2019

Synopsis: The obsession with a paranormal mystery threatens the job, marriage, and sanity of an anthropology professor as she fights to find a missing student.

“The Nightmare Gallery” presents us with professor Sam Rand, as she is searching for one of her students, Sanjay, who went missing as he was researching some mysterious scripts they have recently discovered. Three years later of the disappearance of the student, Sam receives a package that she thinks came from Sanjay and she starts having nightmares that have clues about the whereabouts of Sanjay and what he might have discovered from the scripts. All of these sounds interesting written, but I can assure you that the execution of this idea isn’t.

The best thing that “The Nightmare Gallery” does is that the same-sex relationship of professor Sam and her partner does not have any weight on the plot. Usually, when we have a character from the LGBT community in a horror movie, they are not properly represented, but in this case, it is treated as what would be expected from any heterosexual couple. Besides this and an interesting poster, little more can be saved from this movie.

The story seems interesting at the start, but the more goes on from the movie, the more you become distant from the plot and the more you wish for it to be over. I don’t know if it was the intention of director Gene Blalock and writers Jhan Harp and Rob Stith that you have the same experience as Sam, but you feel as confused trying to make sense of this plot as she is trying to decipher the clues for Sanjay’s whereabouts.

I will not spend much more time reviewing this movie because it is not worthy, “The Nightmare Gallery” doesn’t offer anything new or interesting and, even when it has a promising story, it fails in its execution. The acting is average at best and the screenplay doesn’t do much to immerse you in the story. A boring review for a boring movie.