THE DREAMED ADVENTURE is the most unjustifiably overlong film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It spends an exhausting amount of time establishing its world and characters (at least an hour), and even once the stakes finally seem to get going, the film never escalates in any meaningful way toward the tension, horror, or emotional payoff it seems to be slowly building up to. Why this needed to run nearly three hours is beyond me. So many scenes could’ve been trimmed down or lines of dialogue cut entirely. I was willing to stay patient and give it the benefit of the doubt because there’s clearly a rich history between these characters, and the archaeological setting suggests there’s something far more substantial buried in the past that will have ramifications later on. But they don’t. It just…ends. Apart from a quietly compelling lead performance from Yana Radeva, Valeska Grisebach’s latest really disappointed me. If this is for you, if this is your thing, that’s totally great. I’m happy for you. I don’t mind slow cinema, but I was so just unfulfilled by this one.
