Reveries: The Mind Prison
Featuring Matt Barats
•
Comedy, Independent, 15-May-2026
Two mysterious drifters wander through the desert on a journey of self-discovery. The third film in the “Reveries” trilogy written and performed by Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck, “Reveries: The Mind Prison” is a psychedelic comedy full of absurd musings and visual abstractions. Graham Mason directs this unclassifiable oddity, part visual comedy album, part silent western. Broken into seven chapters, the film begins, middles and ends in the desert—an unforgiving landscape for two men in dark sunglasses who “look forty.” Predictably they are lost in a state between awake and dreaming and their only task is to trek from campfire to campfire to tell stories around it. When an unidentified man materializes out of nowhere wearing a tie, he instructs the forty-year-olds to take drugs and free themselves from the mind prison. And so that’s what they attempt. Building to a climax of real-life home videos showing Barats and Oberbeck as young boys, followed by two dance sequences, it’s a fitting conclusion to the “Reveries” franchise (or will there be more?), maintaining the feel of a gloriously extended montage of inside jokes, set at half speed to a soundtrack of acid rock jams. -KA. Director: Graham Mason. Written and Performed by: Matt Barats, Anthony Oberbeck . Cast: Robby Rackleff, Eudora Peterson, Aarón Alonso. DP: Chris Westlund. Original Music by: Tim Joyce. Sound Design: Matt Giordano.
Up Next in Featuring Matt Barats
-
Let The Lion Out
A guy basically can’t even right now with this breakup, and she, his girlfriend, literally has no idea. Alex Bliss and Matt Barats present “Let the Lion Out,” a sketch film where an oblivious man deflects and defends during a break up by repeating a mantra over and over again. Kimberly (Eleanore ...
-
My Creation
A young creative working on an animation portfolio receives feedback from a friend and a stranger. Matt Barats and Andrew Tisher write and star in “My Creation,” a farcical comedy which highlights two radically different responses to an artist’s work. Dennis is passionate (perhaps overly so) abou...
-
The High Rise Beckons
A sensual advertisement for the lofty high-rise buildings in an ambiguous metropolis. “The High Rise Beckons,” directed by Matt Barats, is a satirical commercial real estate ad where we’re tempted by an oddly erotic narrator and slow punch-in shots of various properties. Building to building, we ...