Review: Miles Robbins and Patrick Schwarzenegger raise hell in the mind-bending 'Daniel Isn't Real'

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Proving themselves more than their famous names, promising young actors Miles Robbins and Patrick Schwarzenegger are the reasons to see 'Daniel Isn't Real.'

. But on the basis of their confident and charismatic work here, they each stand a good shot at stepping out of their families’ shadows in the future.

“Daniel Isn’t Real,” directed and co-written by Adam Egypt Mortimer, is too small and strange a movie to be anyone’s true breakout, but it wouldn’t work without its leads. Or the strong efforts of younger actors Griffin Robert Faulkner and Nathan Reid, whom we first meet, respectively, as troubled youth Luke and his bad influence of an imaginary friend, Daniel.

The question lingers: Is Daniel merely a projection of Luke’s subconscious or is he a demon in disguise? Based on the Brian DeLeeuw book “In This Way I Was Saved,” the film deliberately walks the line between a dramatic exploration of mental illness and a mind-bending visually surreal horror thriller. That line isn’t always easy to sustain, and by the third act it all but disappears.

In supporting roles of varying importance, Masterson, Sasha Lane and Hannah Marks do enough to suggest the film would have been better off giving them more. But “Daniel Isn’t Real” remains a two-man show, and Robbins and Schwarzenegger are an odd couple worth believing in.

 

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