Sometimes it is hard to tell whether what you have seen is sublime or just sublimely ridiculous.

“In Dreams” could easily fit in that ambiguous category.

Neil Jordan (“Interview with the Vampire,” “The Crying Game”) directs this paranormal psycho-thriller starring Annette Bening, Aidan Quinn and Robert Downey Jr.

It is the story of Claire Co, a woman with the ability to see into the mind of serial killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.).

Bening (“The Siege,” “The American President”) starts off the film playing the role of a mother and wife with about as much feeling and reality as Milton Burl.

You would think just about anybody would be able to fake her way through this one, but Bening manages to come off plastic. Her main weapons are her big weepy eyes and runny nose. You haven’t seen this much fake crying and screaming since “The Amy Fisher Story” took network television by storm.

Throughout the film, Claire is subject to the occasional psychic dream, which makes it impossible for her to successfully have sex with her husband.

Aidan Quinn (“Avalon,” “Legends of the Fall”) plays Claire’s frustrated airline pilot husband Paul, who probably isn’t having an affair after all. Phew, that might have led to some interesting plot twists to keep the audience conscious.

Quinn is a pretty good actor, but in this one, he could have been replaced by a super-intelligent chimpanzee with a lisp, and neither one would have been any wiser. When he isn’t on screen, the audience forgets he even exists. The husband is just a plot device waiting to get killed anyway.

Claire has a dream about a missing girl in an orchard. The dream repeats itself, and Paul goes to the police hoping to help the missing girl and his wife.

Turns out that Claire is seeing farther into the future than she realized, and it is actually her own daughter she sees going off with the demented killer.

After an aborted suicide attempt which you wish had been successful, Claire is even more in tune with the freakish killer.

After being committed to the same mental hospital as the killer, Claire decides she must get completely inside his head in order to finish this thing.

She retraces the steps of young Vivian Thompson when he escaped from the hospital and killed a security guard. When the vision ends, Vivian shows himself for the first time, and leads Claire to his hideout (an old apple storehouse).

The movie goes through the motions of what is ultimately a predictable piece of film and an uninspiring example of the genre as a whole.

The only things of any appreciable value in this movie are the amazing underwater shots of a town being flooded to make a reservoir. This is the site of Vivian’s early traumas. There is nothing quite so beautiful as a church under water with scuba divers floating over the graveyard.

But that is all this film has.

Downey Jr. is almost this spooky in his straight roles; playing a freakish serial killer was not that different from roles where he was simply playing screwed up normal characters. He was much scarier in “Less Than Zero,” when he was performing oral sex on his drug dealer, than he was talking about his “mommy problems” in this one.

Most of the film leaves you feeling bad for wanting to see Bening’s character die. She was so unsympathetic, viscous and annoying that she would have been doing us all a favor.

2 stars out of five

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.