Ray Reardon, a successful architect, divorces his wife, and goes to a gallery opening to meet a woman. While there, he bumps into a woman, making her spill wine on herself, and she verbally abuses him. A week later, he runs into the woman, Lena Mathers, at the supermarket. She apologizes for her behavior and the two go to dinner. They have sex the next day, marry shortly thereafter, and become parents.
Despite his happiness in the marriage, Ray becomes suspicious after catching Lena in several lies about her past. An assistant for one of his clients went to Swarthmore College one year before Lena but, while the assistant remembers the university president dying of a heart attack while giving a university wide talk, Lena has no recollection of the president, thinking he was another student. A woman meets the couple at a restaurant but Lena says the woman has confused her for a woman named "Sissy" from Piru, Texas. A few years later, Ray visits Piru, Texas and is told by a town resident that a picture of Lena shown by Ray is Sissy, nickname for Thelma. He visits the family home and meets Lena's parents, who recognize him and know his name. He finds out that alleged beatings of Lena as a child by her mother did not happen (admitted by Lena) and that Lena told her parents Ray was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ray becomes increasingly paranoid when his wife sports bruises that she will not explain and begins doing things that indicate she is having an affair. During a tense confrontation, Lena taunts Ray by claiming to have had an affair with an unnamed friend of his and refusing to tell Ray if their children are biologically his. Ray hits Lena, who then has him arrested and committed to a mental hospital for observation.
Despite an attempt to prove that Lena has been lying, the judge finds Ray to be mentally incompetent and orders him held for six months. Shortly after Ray has been committed, Lena privately admits to him that his suspicions about her were correct and that she had planned this for years to get his money.
Ray devises a plan of revenge. He convinces his friend Elaine to tell Lena that she made a mistake in her "master plan". Elaine suspects Lena has been having an affair with Larry, who secretly bought a house in New Zealand without Elaine's knowledge and might be an escape plan by Lena.
Lena shows up at his birthday party to talk to him. Ray lures her away from the attendants who are supposed to be supervising him and tells her that having him declared insane was the "mistake" because he could not now be held legally accountable for killing her. He proceeds to strangle her to death on the lawn.
Roger Ebert judged Dream Lover a layered and delicate thriller which goes beyond the outer layer of one character maintaining a secret and another trying to discover it, to a game of multiple stages of deception which both the lead characters are to some extent complicit in. He found both Amick and Spader highly effective in their roles, and though he described the ending as disappointing, he concluded, "But the movie's rewards are not really intended for the ending, anyway; it's the sensuous, deadly game of romantic cat-and-mouse that makes 'Dream Lover' worth seeing." He gave it three stars.[2]
