“Nightmare” is the directorial debut of Dylan Bank. His movie focuses on two people, one a budding film student, the other an attractive actress, who hook up at a party. When they wake up the next morning they find a mysterious camera pointed at them from the foot of the bed that was not there the night before, and rather than the footage showing their tryst that evening, shows them instead committing a ghastly murder.

The film features a movie-within-a-movie gimmick that is taken one step further by incorporating a movie-within-a-movie ABOUT a movie. Confused yet? I’ll lay it out a little more linearly. When the main characters discover the tape they try to figure out what happened, who left it, and why. One way that the young director (played by Jason Scott Campbell) goes about finding the culprit is by reenacting the video as a project for his film class. As he begins his project, more tapes start to surface showing him and the actress (Nicole Roderick) committing more murders. Eventually the line between fact, fiction, and reality are blurred and he, and we the audience don’t know whether or not what we’re watching is his movie in production, the tapes left to him, or the actual film.

The movie is strange, drenched in blood and full of nudity. It relies on the shock value of the violent acts committed (mostly in the nude) by the lead actor and actress and harkens back to the ultraviolent scenes from “A Clockwork Orange”. The director certainly has an eye for visual spectacle, but the story behind it is very confusing, especially when it comes to the end of the film. This sort of interplay between the movie, and the movie-within-a-movie (within-a-movie) is effective enough to keep you planted in your seat to find out what happens next, but ultimately left me wondering what it is exactly I just watched. But perhaps that was the whole point.