Reveries: The Mind Prison
From the Archives
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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.
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