Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Director: Cate Shortland
Writer: Billy Cruder
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Bryan Cranston, Stephen Amell, Sterling K. Brown, Mila Kunis, Allison Janney, Vanessa Hudgens, Imogen Poots, Maya Hawke, Finn Jones, Brittany O'Grady
Plot: Los Angeles. Samantha Hammond (Elisabeth Moss) is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent electoral advocate and upcoming election politician named Ed Laverty (Bryan Cranston). Her husband Frank (Stephen Amell) is a lawyer who works in the same firm as her father-in-law. They all live together in a big house with Joan (Maya Hawke), Frank's teenage daughter from a very short previous marriage when he was very young. A few weeks earlier a woman named Julia Green (Mila Kunis) had moved into the house next door, a not particularly talented actress but quite famous in Hollywood for alleged flirtations with important actors and for her unruly life that often ended up on newspapers. In fact, Julia often throws big nightly parties filled with alcohol and drugs that often infuriate Samantha, who usually enjoys the regular and peaceful life inside her home. Julia, on the other hand, wakes up very late in the day and spends the afternoon in the pool or sunbathing with a few drinks. Samantha often finds herself observing her in those quiet moments. Ever since Julia moved into the house near Samantha, she has suffered from insomnia and sometimes terrible dreams and other times where images of wild orgies, drugs and sex are conjured up. To try to remedy the problem, she decided to turn to a psychoanalyst, Dr. Steers (Allison Janney) who advises her to write in a diary everything she remembers of dreams.
During a meeting between Ed and Frank, they discuss a court case they are working on involving various betrayals by a pair of designers. Then a phone call is made from an anonymous woman who claims to Ed that she has harmful information about her family. Then Frank's secretary Debbie (Imogen Poots) brings the coffee to the two men and Frank takes a look at Debbie's ass when she leaves the room. Ed, realizing this, asks Frank if he has been unfaithful to Samantha on any occasion, but Frank categorically denies it. At the end of the job, however, we see Frank going into an apartment and we discover that he has a clandestine affair with Debbie, his secretary. It is late and then the two greet each other with another kiss. Frank returns home and finds Samantha in a changing bra before bedtime. During that night Samantha's dreams seem to seem stranger and more complicated and during the scenes they appear to be dreams or hallucinations but may be partly real. Frank, seeing the woman's very tormented night, advises her to go to the psychotherapist again. The next afternoon he goes to her and describes the previous night including a lesbian encounter between her and Julia, culminating in Samantha stabbing the seductive Julia to death multiple times. In an enigmatic queue to the dream sequence, Samanthaa says she saw two hooded hippies who apparently witnessed the murder without intervening. The next night we see Samantha having a dream very similar to the previous night. In the morning Frank asks his wife if she had a good night but the woman says no, disconsolate and almost crying. Frank hugs Samantha. As long as the two have breakfast, confused sounds can be heard in the vicinity of their home. The two look out and see the police and an ambulance at Julia's home. In addition, many journalists begin to arrive. The two go out to find out what's going on and go there to find out what's going on. Detectives Tyrone Corbin (Sterling K. Brown) and young Amy Mendoza (Vanessa Hudgens) are in charge of the investigation. Amy and Tyrone wander around the house and we see that the room and condition of the corpse are identical to the depiction in the dream sequence that Samantha had. Upon learning of the murder, Samantha runs inside escaping the controls and about seeing the crime scene and when she enters Julia's apartment and sees the body, she loses consciousness and is taken by Corbin before falling into the blood.
After eliminating a false and selfish confession of a delusional habitual at Green's party, Corbin focuses on Samantha Hammmond despite Amy not seeming very convinced. Meanwhile, Samantha, on a shopping excursion with Joan, sees two hooded people walking out of a market who appear to match the ones she saw in her dream. Samantha invites Joan to follow them. Following them in an old abandoned theater where there are other people who are doing a strange show despite the effects of the drug on these people being quite evident. Suddenly the two women are approached by two of them who had noticed their presence. They introduce themselves as Ralph (Finn Jones) and Sarah (Brittany O'Grady. Joan asks them if they know Samantha or have never seen her before. However, the answer of the two is negative.
After speaking to Dr. Steers, the police secretly obtain Samantha's fingerprints and match the ones found on the murder weapon and she is soon arrested and charged with killing Julia. However, doubts begin to circulate between Corbin and Mendoza as they wonder if she really is the killer and why she was describing the murder to her psychoanalyst in detail before it actually happened. Amy suggests it could be that something one read her dream journal which she stored and modeled the murder on the dream images she described to frame her for something she fantasized about. Corbin also wonders if Samantha is the killer - the two hooded people who claim to have witnessed her crime without intervening. While Samantha is awaiting trial near a maximum security sanatorium, she sees one of the hooded people break in and chase her across the grounds with a long knife. Samantha escapes into the building and, in an attempt to hide, enters a room containing a horrific experiment with bound and dismembered people. Samantha passes out in horror. When he arrives, there is no trace of the threatening person. The sanatorium director believes Samantha had one of her elaborate hallucinations.
Meanwhile, Samantha's father swings into overdrive with her case and manages to elaborate a suspicion that appeals to the police. In fact, one day he witnesses a kiss between Debbie and Frank and develops a theory to protect his daughter. She reveals with great attorney skill to Corbin that Frank is having an affair with Debbie and that Julia may have blackmailed him for money so as not to expose his extramarital affair to Samantha. Ed's argument is enough to release his daughter on bail momentarily, but Frank remains free for obvious lack of evidence. After her release, while relaxing by the pool, Samantha is contacted by a woman who reveals she has important news about Julia's death and agrees to meet her on a secret date at a hotel. Once there, Samantha is attacked by the usual hooded man in the basement and chased through the building where she is attacked by bats in the attic and brutally stabbed when the man reaches her on the roof. But Samantha is saved by a guard who heard her scream. The next day Joan looking for information to exonerate her mother and decides to go to the old abandoned theater where the hippies are present. Sarah becomes aware of her presence and waves her goodbye. The next day, Joan is found dead, with her throat slit, in an alley near a garbage can. Corbin and Mendoza meet Samantha who is recovering at her father's estate in Bel-Air to inquire about who is trying to kill her (although no one has ever seen these hooded people trying to attack her) and about the blackmail Julia may have planned for Frank. Meanwhile, the police find some traces on the body of poor Joan.
Corbin finally tracks down and arrests the hippie couple, Ralph and Sarah, whom he takes to the scene of the crime to interrogate them about the murder of Julia Green. Although Ralph admits to have stalked Samantha and murdered Joan, they protest their innocence claiming not to remember anything about that night because they were full of LSD. Then a phone call comes informing the police that Ed Laverty found dead at his estate, the victim of a suicide, and leaving behind a note confessing to the murder of Julia Green which seems to wrap up the case.
A few days later, Samantha is at her father's grave when Corbin and Mendoza arrives to offer their condolences to her. When Corbin asks Samantha about the phone call that her father got from probably Julia Green which Samantha admits that she knew about, he asks how did she know that Julia phoned Ed Laverty on the day before she was murdered since he never told anybody about it. Too late to realize her slip, Corbin deduces Samantha's guilt as she was with Julia during that day the phone call was made.
As it turns out, Samantha really did kill Julia after she threatened to go public with their lesbian relationship they've been having for some months. Samantha did break into Julia's apartment and stabbed her to death, only to realize that two hippies saw her, which made her panic and leave the scene of the crime. Samantha had felt certain that the two hippies would describe her to the police. The murderous, but perfectly sane, Samantha entered the event in her dream diary immediately afterwards so by combining details of the murder with images from the recurring nightmares for which she had sought treatment, she hopped to avoid a murder sentence and get off with guilt by temporary insanity that the dream diary would provide plausible evidence in court of a split personality. But Samantha did not realize that both hippies where high on LSD and unable to register the significance of what they saw that night. Samantha is then led away by Inspector Corbin and Mendoza from her father's grave to a waiting police car.
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