Lucid had its world première at Fantasia, 21 July 2025
Lucid opens with a medium shot of a hippie-ish woman (Amber Dandelion) in a red dress, with red string braided into her otherwise blonde hair. She is sitting on a small bench under a tree, staring directly into the camera, and looking upset – or perhaps unhinged – as she breathes heavily and places her hand over her heart.
It will take quite a while for this woman’s identity to come into focus, but although she will play a crucial if oblique rôle in the film’s events, she is certainly not its protagonist. That would instead be Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), a young, somewhat scatty student in the Nineties whose latest messy, derivative fish-themed piece risks getting her thrown off her art course. It is not that she lacks talent, but rather that she struggles to find any kind of coherent personal narrative to contextualise her work. When her professor (John Luna) asks her to “dig deeper” and to make “something with heart”, she will, like the protagonist of Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys (2025), turn to a trans psychic (Mackenzie Lemire) to help her lift the curse – although this time that curse is a creative block.
What ensues is a hallucinatory journey into self, as Mia downs below-the-counter ‘Lucid’ candy to open the doors in her mind to her missing memories, to traverse a path lined with fish, hearts and demons (rendered in lo-fi hand-crafted costumes, not unlike the ones Mia herself fashions), and to trace a thin red line back to her buried trauma, all in pursuit of what her grandmother (Jo Barnes) calls “the ugly stuff, but the honest stuff.” Mia, whose grandmother is a potter and whose parents were musicians, has art in her very blood – but she does not know who she is, and must work at uncovering the horrific childhood experiences that are hidden deep in her unconscious.
Expanded by writer/directors Ramsey Fendall and Deanna Milligan from the 2021 short that Milligan helmed and Fendall shot, Lucid is a psychedelic psychodrama where the creative process is writ large, as one woman takes drugs and delves into her past to understand her own artistic instincts and deep-seated rage. Mia’s response to having a self-portrait rejected is to go home, stab the canvas – and then the armchair it is rested on – with scissors, and then to lay back for an anger wank. She is clearly not well, and filled with self-destructive urges, and those scissors – an essential item for someone working in mixed media and crafting her own costumes, masks and models – are also a weapon, and a tool for deletion, erasure but also for reconstitution (something all too familiar to Fendall and Milligan, who edited their own retro 16mm and 35mm footage). The scissors symbol often seen inscribed on Mia’s temple emblematises a woman who was gaslit as a child into editing out all the worst things that she had seen and heard, and who now must recover them from the cutting room floor of her own psyche in order to piece together a fuller, longer director’s cut of herself. If Mia wants to progress, she must first cut the (red) cord.
In discovering who she really is, and was, Mia is also finding the key to becoming a true artist. Mia needs to confront her problems head-on, as difficult as that may be. “Don’t be a chickenshit”, her art school friend Desdemona (Elaine Thrash Oliveira) tells her – and sure enough, later in the fast food outlet Bitchin Chickn where Mia works part-time as a fry cook, Desdemona’s words will be nightmarishly realised, as Mia is visited by a giant chicken literally covered in shit. Indeed, once Mia starts taking her unconventional meds in much larger doses than were prescribed, the film becomes a trippy mishmash of Mia’s muddled memories and feelings, monstrously manifesting – but all these are the jigsaw pieces which, once reassembled, will reveal her identity, and decode her art.
Lucid is a mannered musical odyssey, held together by Taylor’s intense wide-eyed performance, channeling, in one class presentation, the uncontrolled ecstasy – what the professor calls a “gift-wrapped train wreck” – of Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), which is high praise indeed. As Mia works through what else she may have inherited from her mother beyond an inclination to perform, in the end she will touch, indeed splash, everyone with a presentation, real or imagined, that is straight from her heart, and she will emerge from the tunnel of her mind, as though reborn, in a fully conjoined hybrid of art and self. The closest analogues for this portrait of an artist falling apart on a quest for inspiration under pressure are perhaps Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979) or Joe Begos’ Bliss (2019) – but Fendall and Milligan’s film remains very much an introspective freakout in its own league.
strip: Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall’s retro freakout takes a blocked artist on a psychotherapeutic journey to forgotten trauma
© Anton Bitel
