Treatment

Dream On Treatment, By Piers Cooke Kaiser

 

Dream On is a dramatic short film, with surreal overtones, depicting the breakdown of a typical middle-class marriage.  The film explores themes of desire, rage, alienation, and loss.

The husband returns home one night after work to find his wife waiting for him in the hallway of their suburban home.  Their home reflects character over affluence.   The large television is not a recent model, the walls are painted yellow, the rooms contain antique bookcases, a large oak dining table, vases, stacks of books, a fading mirror.  The décor of the home suggests a hand-me-down heritage; things fading but cared-for.  The couple are in their early forties and have never had children: they have enjoyed life, travel, theatre, socialising, rather than raise a family.  

The wife is slim, dark-haired and well presented.  She wears a grey cashmere cardigan, dark jeans and is bare foot.  Her husband is tall and thin.  He wears a suit but is slightly unkempt; his hair is mussed; he has stubble and looks tired.  Arriving home, the wife notices that her husband is not wearing his wedding ring and she questions him about it, asking if he even cares anymore.  We can tell from their demeanour and the state of the house, that this is now a familiar routine between the pair of them; the fridge is bare, the house has an empty, cold feel to it, we are looking-in on a marriage that began to fade a long time ago.  A heated argument ensues, and quickly it turns physical.  The wife slaps her husband, and he retaliates by grabbing her throat.  The scuffle moves into the hallway, where the wife cracks her husband over the head with an empty beer bottle, sending him crashing to the ground.  The man lies motionless at the foot of the stairs, blood seeping from the back of his cracked skull.  The argument seems to have escalated dramatically, the resolution violent and extreme, until we realise the wife has been dreaming all we have seen so far.

Waking in bed, the wife appears calm, however we quickly discover we are not back in the safety and familiarity of the real world: the sound of a man choking quickly reestablishes uncertainty and unease.  The husband has been watching his I-pad whilst eating crisps in bed, and is now seemingly choking on a crisp lodged painfully in his throat.  To our surprise and horror, the wife remains calm, almost oblivious to her husband’s impending death.  She gets out of bed and begins to pack her suitcase, even though the man in the bed is choking to death.  To the soundtrack of his dying breaths, the wife walks out of the bedroom, down the stairs and pauses at the front door; a moment of reflection as she takes in the photograph of the couple in happier times.  Then, without hesitation or doubt, she opens the front door and steps out into the still night of the city.  We end with the wife gazing into the dark night, haloed by a streetlight, a single tear falls from her eye.