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He’s been having dreams that don’t belong to him since his last birthday. That night, after a celebratory dinner out with his parents, Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin) had a nightmare that he was murdered. Ever since, he has gone to bed every night and almost always drifts sleepily not into no-rhyme-no-reason manifestations of his subconscious worries — textbook nightmares about intruders ramming down front doors, fathers being killed by one’s own hand — but rather what appear to be visions from another person’s life. These strange recollections seemingly belong to a wealthy young man, fond of tennis and womanizing, who died violently sometime in the 1940s (you can tell by the car he drives) when his wife, presumably named Marcia (Margot Kidder), stalked him by canoe while he was taking an evening skinny-dip. In a rage, she thumped his head with her oar enough times to put him at the bottom of this black befogged lake. 

After having a “dream” about the latter incident, college-professor Peter concludes that what he’s seeing warrants second opinion. After his therapist opines that he’s probably experiencing plain-and-simple hallucinations, a dissatisfied Peter goes to a sleep laboratory — a place that confirms that when he’s having these visions, the machines aren’t reacting the way they normally would when someone is far enough into their REM cycle to get lost in fantasies of their molars falling out. This revelation, paired with an image on TV one night of something seen in a dream, persuades Peter to go out and look for more answers himself. He travels to Massachusetts (where he thinks this murder took place) to uncover who this long-dead man is and whether he’s his reincarnated self or the carrier of some kind of message he still doesn’t have enough words for to decipher. 

You expect The Reincarnation of Peter Proud to get progressively nuttier; its very premise almost promises plot twists. But it turns out that this honey-slow psychological almost-thriller, directed by J. Lee Thompson (1962’s Cape Fear, 1986’s Murphy’s Law) and adapted by Max Ehrlich from a book he wrote, is not so much interested in being orthodoxly thrilling and twisty as it is in prodding at the more-mundane-than-cinematic horrors the progressively more unsettling story invokes: the cyclicality of trauma (for the people about whom Peter is having visions and on whom he will eventually infringe); the unknowability of fate and how it can unpredictably, even horrifically, entwine itself with those of others. 

The movie can at times be a little too slow-going. The middle period, during which Peter begins dating the woman who is technically his past self’s daughter (Jennifer O’Neill), tends to drag, though does contain some career-best work from an older, more regretful Kidder in old-age makeup. But I consistently dug the film’s provocative and bigger than usual (for horror) ideas — and how they sneak up on you rather than conk you over the head — and how the presentation of the narrative itself is redolent of a dream state. You know those kinds of dreams you have sometimes where you’re itching to learn, see, or experience something but wake up before it can happen, so you start the day irritated because you didn’t get the satisfaction of an answer? The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is like an extended, more intelligible version of that. The finale is so wonderfully ghoulish — it almost makes the story feel like an old moral tale — that I’m sure Peter Proud might wish he’d woken up prematurely yet again instead of getting what he thought he wanted.