“Morning” is described as being “set in a near future where society has a pill that does away with the need to sleep [and] the added help of an artificial sun means there is finally no end to morning daylight, living, and work.” It’s a premise that somewhat recalls that of “Sleep No More,” the 2015, found-footage horror-flavored, “Doctor Who” episode about workers on a space station who need only spend a few minutes in a high-tech pod to get a month’s worth of sleep. (The episode was penned by queer horror aficionado Mark Gatiss, natch.) The whole thing made for a creepily effective anti-capitalism parable — as “New Who” has often been wont to make — and it sounds as though “Morning” has an equally radical message beneath its mind-bending exterior.
Laura Dern will star in the film as Cathy, “an ambitious, driven early advocate of a sleepless world” who attempts to mend her relationship with her estranged son, Danny, even with the anniversary of her husband Frank’s death bearing down on the pair of them. However, thanks to the arrival of “someone from Frank’s past” (Naomi Ackie, seen above in “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”), Danny is “drawn away from his mother into a subversive underworld of dreamers.” As other members of Danny’s generation begin rebelling in the hopes of reclaiming their dreams (quite literally), Cathy is forced to confront “the nightmares that have begun to bleed into her waking life.”