The thing about dreams is that they’re profound, but also stupid. Every once in a while I’ll have a dream that, in the moment, feels like the most suspenseful movie I’ve ever seen, that leaves me shaken and stunned when I wake up. Then, of course, I groggily try to recount the narrative to my partner, and realize that the entire thing was a load of nonsense. We often describe surreal movies as “dreamlike,” but a truly dreamlike film would be unwatchable. The trick is to recreate the sense of waking up from a dream, that sense of unease as you try to separate dream from reality. It is this uncanniness that Canadian filmmaker Anthony Scott Burns mines in his sophomore effort, Come True, and while he occasionally overreaches, the result is often remarkable.
Bad dreams are only one of the troubles affecting teenage runaway Sarah Dunne (Julia Sarah Stone). Sleep comes fitfully where she can get it– sometimes at a sympathetic friend’s house, sometimes in a sleeping bag in an unguarded playground, more often than not in class. When she does manage to nod off, she finds herself plagued by nightmares of a bald, hulking figure looming over a Gigeresque dreamscape. At wit’s end, Sarah finds a ray of hope in an ad for a sleep study, under the eye of Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington) and his assistants, Jeremy and Anita (Landon Liboiron and Carlee Ryski). At first, this seems like an answer to several of Sarah’s problems: a source of income, respite from nightmares, and, most crucially, a reliable bed to sleep in. But Dr. Meyer has ulterior motives, and Sarah soon realizes that her bad dreams might be even more disturbing than she believes.
COME TRUE Still 6 – Landon Liboiron as ‘Jeremy’ in Anthony Scott Burns’ COME TRUE. Courtesy of IFC Midnight. An IFC Midnight Release.
When one uses the word “Cronenbergian,” it’s usually to describe visceral body horror and gooey excess. Burns is clearly indebted to the Canadian horror maestro, but instead draws inspiration from the feel of a David Cronenberg film: the clinical detachment, the creeping dread, the chilly, Canadian, brutalist architecture (Heatherington, with his argyle sweaters and thick-rimmed glasses, even appears to be done up in Cronenberg drag). Even before the film veers into outright horror, we get the sense that something isn’t right here. Between the queasy widescreen cinematography (courtesy of Burns himself) and the blankly menacing mystico-scientific gobbeldygook spouted by the scientists, we get just enough solid footing to feel like we’re peering into the dark corners of the real world, tugging at strings we really ought not to unravel.
It’s possible that none of this would work without the performance Julia Sarah Stone. As Sarah, Stone projects a very real sense of disaffected youth; up until she straps on the Tron-like headgear in the retro-futuristic lab, one could almost be tricked into thinking they’re watching something in the vein of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Yet she also manages to resist the temptation to lean too far into mopey pathos, a common misstep that can send a low-budget genre film into mumblecore territory. Instead, she lets us into that weird headspace of not quite being able to shake a dream you can’t entirely remember. When we see Sarah’s nightmares, Burns resists the temptation to make them “movie dreams,” with Sarah running from plainly metaphorical dangers. Instead, they operate like real dreams, in flashes and images which make a strange sort of sense in the moment, but fall apart when you think about them in the light of day (it’s clear that Burns has done his homework on the terrifying phenomenon of sleep paralysis– for more terrifying shadow-giants, check out Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare). That doesn’t make the effect they have on us any less real, and Stone’s performance here may be the clearest articulation of this unease I’ve seen on camera. It’s the dreamer, not the dream.
Julia Sarah Stone as ‘Sarah’ in Anthony Scott Burns’ COME TRUE. Courtesy of IFC Midnight. An IFC Midnight Release.
Unfortunately, there are moments where Burns fails to follow this guiding maxim. While Come True excels at dramatizing both dreams and the waking anxieties they provoke, it falters when it tries to blur the line between the two. Once the nightmares have been unleashed toward the beginning of the third act, there is a sense that Burns is attempting a Mulholland Drive-style inversion of reality. However, like most human beings on earth, Burns lacks the mastery of David Lynch, and the effect is more muddy than anything else (it doesn’t help that the story shifts focus around this time to Liboiron’s Jeremy, to my eyes the least compelling of the film’s characters). This is especially disappointing, as it comes at a moment when the story and the imagery are otherwise fully locking into place, and while the film does recover its footing somewhat in the climax, it never entirely regains that momentum. Then there’s the matter of the film’s final shot, which, taken at face value, threatens to negate everything that came before it. It’s a good twist, but it feels like it belongs in a different story, and in the moment feels like more of a “Why not?” sort of ending than a cohesive summation of Sarah’s journey.
Still, I don’t want to knock Come True too badly. I would say about 85% of the film works, and what I liked, I really liked. It’s a simple premise, but Burns carries it off with a startling confidence, mixing Lovecraftian horror, striking visuals, and foreboding atmosphere. Yet there’s also something distinctly pleasurable about its creepiness, or even comfortable. With its new-age psychobabble, clunky, analogue hardware, and washes of Pure Moods synths (courtesy of vaporwave stars Electric Youth), Come True almost feels like a lost monster-of-the-week X-Files episode, or maybe one of those weird CD-ROM games from the ‘90s with live actors in front of digital backgrounds. Like a good, creepy dream, the overall effect is enough to outweigh the parts that don’t make sense– and like a particularly indelible nightmare, it’s likely to stick with you long after you open your eyes.
Come True
2020
dir. Anthony Scott Burns
105 min.
Available digitally and on demand Friday, 3/12
Right now Boston’s most beloved theaters need your help to survive. If you have the means, the Hassle strongly recommends making a donation, purchasing a gift card, or becoming a member at the Brattle Theatre, Coolidge Corner Theatre, and/or the Somerville Theatre. Keep film alive, y’all.
