In Somnus, the first feature film by Chris Reading, humanity is doomed, again, because of atomic bombs, again, and a female AI wants to kill everyone, again. Unfocused and underdone, from the script, to the performances, to the camera work, it was as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they wanted to be Roger Corman or Stanley Kubrick. While both taking itself too seriously and not seriously enough, the film is an underdone turkey with burned skin and a cold, wet center.

The main character, Harry Emerson (Marcus McMahon), is the captain of a ship carrying minerals from Phobos and on his final mission before retirement. But as the protagonist, he doesn’t do much and spends most of his time in hibernation imagining himself on a beach with his wife, whom he lost earlier in the mission. When she died she was decapitated and connected to the ship as an AI, and acts as a robot ghost of Harry’s former wife. Meryl (Meryl Griffiths) is evidently having an existential crisis and has intimate conversations with Rupert (Rohit Gokani) the mechanic about the meaning of life and death, all of which she should be having with Harry. When Rupert is killed before we get to Somnus, it is the second mate, again not Harry, who learns what the inhabitants of Somnus are up to, and then dies before he can tell Harry anything. The film even opens without Harry, in a scene from the 1950s, where a professor (I think) is given a book of the life work of a friend, which only appears again when the prisoners in the colony somehow have it. In the end, after a series of inconsequential skirmishes on the colony, Harry learns that Meryl is trying to kill the crew, “for the survival of humanity,” and goes into the core of the spaceship to destroy Meryl, whom, for his intents and purposes is still his wife.

There could have been an interesting film, or short story, about a man who is slowly manipulated by the robot ghost of his wife. Instead we have a series of scenes where unnecessary questions and underdeveloped ideas are thrown together, and shot haphazardly. Somnus is a film that wants to tackle the meaning of life but won't do the work necessary to come up with an answer.