Lucid (2025) 'Fantasia' Movie Review: A Surrealist, Campy, Punk-Fueled Trip through the Mind of a Restless Artist

“Lucid” (2025) brought back my memories of Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon.” Released in 1943, Deren’s 14-minute short follows a woman from the moment she enters a house. Initially, it seems like just a mundane part of her life. Yet, the film quickly turns into what could be her worst nightmare. She peeks out of her window and sees someone, and it evokes something deep within her. Suddenly, she struggles to walk around in a space that looks like a maze. Besides her, we barely notice other figures. Even if no one says a word, we feel deeply for this woman’s yearning for the unknown. We don’t learn any specific details about her, and yet, it puts us closer to what she might be feeling. In parts, the film is a mystery. In parts, it’s a drama, seemingly with no end in sight.

“Lucid” borrows a leaf from similar experimental dramas that are more about an underlying sentiment. Much like Deren’s film, it hints at the root of its characters’ all-encompassing misery. To do so, it breaks the construct of space and time to allude rather than reveal how an artist navigates through her creative block. The film is about Mia (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student who struggles to create an art piece for her school assignment. It’s not that she is dull or lazy. In fact, she has so many ideas that she cannot even rest for a minute. Her ideas are also rather compelling, especially in the context of the film’s 1990s setting.

Mia looks and behaves like a classic punk artist. She walks around in a jacket covered in all sorts of pins and buttons. She doesn’t care if her hair is greasy or if she looks like she has just woken up from sleep. It’s her ideas that reveal who she is. These ideas are largely anti-status quo. She wants to challenge the patriarchal perception of women. So, her entire existence seems like an act of rebellion against something or someone. From what we see, this ‘someone’ is the male art professor who doesn’t value her creative output. However, there’s more to it.

lucid (2025) movie — A still from “Lucid” (2025)

Mia has meaningful ideas, but she struggles to find a meaningful way to convey them. She wants to express through art, but can’t create something that seems honest — something that represents her, at least by those in charge of dictating what’s good and what isn’t. The film shows her trying to decode the source of her creative block. It’s clear that Mia’s rebellious journey isn’t devoid of a cause, but her cause initially seems more institutional and less personal. The film tries to unpeel layers of her identity struggles. It isn’t as neat or clean as the usual cathartic movies end up being, nor does it pretend to be.

As the title suggests, “Lucid” unfolds like a fever dream through Mia’s mind. The film throws many things at you, whether images or sounds, hoping you make a connection and find sense in its inherently sensory experience. It is a genre film first and a character-driven film, later. So, it makes sense that it is trippy, wild, and incoherent. In that context, it faithfully reflects Mia’s attempts to map out pieces of her elusive past, while struggling with self-doubt. The film is frequently repulsive or provocative since she gets conditioned into believing that she is supposed to be the opposite.

The film offers a mix of surrealism and camp. It has the dream-like imagery that tries to shed light on Mia’s subconscious, placing seemingly irrelevant elements next to each other. At the same time, it takes place in an elevated reality, faithful to how she views the world. It echoes her dizzying dissociation with the reality that doesn’t seem to care about her creative output. It’s rooted in the line of thought that sees art mainly as a form of expression. Until there’s any substance, there’s no form. The film is about her struggling to find the substance to improve the form of her work.

Hence, “Lucid” works as a representational and discourse-driven piece of cinema. It presents flawed female characters, devoid of judgment beyond what its characters might hold. Through them, it challenges gender norms. At the same time, it is a sincere effort to present Mia’s anguish. One moment, it fills you with the franticness of Mia’s present life, and the next moment, it charms you with its emotional warmth. There’s just so much to resonate with in her journey and to relish in the film’s stylistic ambitions that it is hard not to fall for its beating heart. Agreed that it has its rough patches, and it doesn’t dig enough into what Mia is going through. Still, it’s a stylistic gambit that leaves you positively overwhelmed.