In Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte’s sci-fi thriller, a male scientist has his brain hooked up to a comatose woman (Jurga Jutaite), and discovers she’s smoking hot and thinks about sex most of the time.
Lukas (Marius Jampolskis) finds himself falling in love with the Sleeping Beauty (called Aurora, of course) and lying about his erotic encounters with her, in order to keep seeing her in his dreams. Eventually he becomes obsessed with saving Aurora from the mental anguish he dimly perceives through their shared brain waves.
There are interesting themes: about how much of the impulse to love is hidden from the conscious mind, and how much of sex is fantasy. But the impact is diminished by lifeless leads.
The lab supervisors, so solemn they verge on camp, are more fun than the lovers. Lukas awakens after another naked mind-meld and immediately a guy in a white coat deadpans something like, “I’ll have to inform the Ethics Committee.”
The movie has some great style elements, including an Escher-esque lab room and a marvelous dream-world house with walls that look like shredded documents. And toward the end, despite the wintry script and chilly acting, some emotion begins to break through. But it’s never a good sign when the art direction offers more fascination than the sex.