Come True

Greetings again from the darkness. Anyone who has experienced recurring nightmares understands how they impact not just the time you are asleep, but all waking hours as well. Anthony Scott Burns is the writer-director-cinematographer and is working from a story by Daniel Weissenberger. The film is blend of science fiction and horror, and Burns excels in creating an atmosphere of dread upfront.

Burns kicks things off by immersing us in the dark, troubling dream of high school student Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone, "The Killing"). She wakes up not in her bed at home, but instead wrapped in a sleeping blanket on a local playground. Sarah prefers to sleep in a park or at a friend's house, rather than at her own home for reasons we can infer. Desperate for sleep and rest, she answers an advertisement for a sleep study at the university.

Based on the cars, movie posters, and tech equipment, the film is set in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Even the synth music is of the era, courtesy of Electric Youth and Burns' own Pilotpriest. The music mirrors the film in that it's superb in the beginning, and less effective in the second half. The blue-gray color palette and icy cold weather perfectly complement the unorthodox sleep study, and those who are running it. Jeremy/Riff (Landon Liboiron, TRUTH OR DARE, 2018) is the creepiest while looking like a bearded Harry Potter, though it takes a while to unravel his story. Also present is Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington), who does little more than quietly observe. Allowing this character to play a bigger role could have benefited the story.

The mystique of dreams is what's at play here, and the blinking monitors and concerned look of the scientists all serve their purpose. Unfortunately, it's the dreams that let us down. The shadow man associated with sleep paralysis is on display here, but his glowing eyes amongst the abundance of gray lacked the eerie imagery need to capture my imagination. In fact, I found the dream sequences to drag, even after the first one got my hopes up.

It's highly likely that Burns is a fan of filmmaker David Cronenberg, and we do appreciate the homage to Stanley Kubrick and Rodney Ascher. However, to be truly effective, a sci-fi/horror film, especially one dabbling in pseudo-psychology, must have more than the right look. Lead actress Julia Sarah Stone brings a unique appearance to the role, and she's the reason I stuck with it until the end. My gut feeling is this could have been a world class short film, and it seems probable that I missed a deeper message here. But neither of those was enough to overcome my feeling of boredom during the film's second half. COME TRUE will open in select theaters, digital platforms, and cable VOD on March 12, 2021 courtesy of IFC Midnight

An insomniac student signs up for a sleep study, only to find her dreams mean more than she knew ...

Good performances in a story that reaches to another dimension in the exploration of character. The dreamscapes are macabre and well shot, and while the pace is patchy there is a moment of deep fear as the threat is fully revealed. The score is also interesting, except for ten minutes around the middle point when it seems to tread water just as the tension should be piled on.

A couple of points where credulity is stretched, but by the end I found myself having to rethink them because of the change in the logic of the story telling. There is a key to this, but I haven't figured out how far back the crucial change occurred. The director points to a Jungian framework, with captions naming four aspects of the psyche - the persona, anima and animus, the shadow, and the self. At the start we encounter the shadow, which is clearly part of a dream, but looking back it's unclear whether we touch base with reality at all - and so the heroine's odd domestic circumstances are never explained. There are a few more clues, like the change of eye colour, the disappearance of the other female volunteer, the simultaneity of the dreams, and some deep point about having sex with one's own opposite, but I'd have to watch more closely to piece it together.

The danger with hanging a story from a framework is that you lose touch with the character and drama. This does a good job, but I'd really have to trust the director's skill to commit to rewatching.

Overall: Ambitious, but I wasn't sure what it was offering me.

This movie has several things going for it, but ultimately disappoints. The central idea is a good one, and the lead actor gives a strong performance. She's likely to become more well known soon. The cinematography is strong, and the score is good, as is the direction, which owes quite a bit to Kubrick. Where the movie fails is in the writing, and to a lesser extent in the performances of the supporting cast. The dialogue is sometimes trite, and the plot is thin with holes. The end is both predictable and yet somehow even more disappointing than one expects. I don't mean to be harsh; the movie is worth a look. Just be prepared to be let down a bit by it all, in the end.

So the entire film is about this girl who almost ran away from home who enlists in a sleep study. They monitor her brainwaves on trippy CRT monitors from the 90s and transform them into images to see what she is dreaming about. More or less everything makes sense until the very end, when the spell is broken and you realize that it is all a pretentious movie with "a message" that you care nothing about at all. I don't want to spoil it, because many people seem to have enjoyed the dream mysticism and symbolism of which the film is full of. Myself, I was intrigued by the obvious plot and was severely disappointed by the ending.

All in all the acting is decent, the pacing is slow, but consistent and the dream sequences, even if they look like something made in a few days on a 3D designer, are pretty cool. What I disliked profoundly is the bait and switch at the end.

If you want to enjoy it, take it as a personal project of the writers to express something personal, like Phantasm was, and give it a try. Just know in advance that nothing truly scary or active will happen and that the film is slowly, very slowly, getting to its point by avoiding it most of the film.

Come True is worth a watch. I wasn't completely satisfied with the ending but that's just my opinion. The story itself is engaging to watch. The atmospheric soundtrack brings a mysterious ambiance that keeps you focussed on the story. The sound was the best part of this movie. The acting wasn't bad even though not everybody were perfect. It's not really a movie I would recommend but it's good enough if you have nothing else to do and like mysteries with a pinch of sci-fi.