Come True (2021)

Ain’t Gonna Dream No More

For my money, the best movie version of a dreamscape actually appeared on television. In “Restless”, the Season Four finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers and her friends are stalked by an ancient spirit through a series of sometimes comical, sometimes terrifying head trips.

I haven’t seen the episode in over twenty years, but writer/director Joss Whedon’s grasp of unconscious/subconscious logic has been my gold standard for how artists translate dreams to the screen. Characters pop in and out of conversations without interrupting continuity of thought. Walking through a door might find you emerging in a crawl space on your hands and knees. And, of course, secret desires, fears, and hostilities can manifest themselves in ways that neither dreamer nor viewer is fully able (or willing) to comprehend.

That show came out the same year as Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and a year before Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. It seems 2001 was the last gasp for ambitious, mainstream, dream-centric fantasies. Fitting, since the nightmarish political and pop-cultural aftershocks of 9/11 sent us scrambling for alternate realities that we could (ostensibly) control.

Virtual reality became our vicarious playground of choice. From Matrix sequels to Ready Player One to social media bubbles to the ubiquity of reality TV, the messy, self-examining roulette wheel of dreams was hard enough to stomach at the end of long and desperate days—they certainly had no place in the realm of entertainment.

(For the record, 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street remake doesn’t count. After ideas-strapped movie studios had milked the IP cow to death, Samuel Bayer’s film emerged as the last bloody drop. I’m also excluding Inception from that same year. Even though Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster fantasy is explicitly about dreams, it’s more in line with The Matrix‘s conceit of genre archetypes manipulating virtual worlds—rather than exploring what happens when regular people fall asleep.)

With Come True, writer/director Anthony Scott Burns makes a bold case for the dream genre’s return. Based on a story by Daniel Weissenberger, the film weaves in and out of a young woman’s bizarre visions, which threaten to overtake her reality. We meet Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), a Canadian high school student, as she wakes up in a sleeping bag at the foot of a playground slide. She’s estranged from her mother; falls asleep in class, and can only occasionally rely on best friend Zoe (Tedra Rogers) for a place to crash.

Sarah volunteers for a months-long sleep study at a local clinic—partially as a safe place to spend her nights, and partially to get some decent rest (or at least figure out why she can’t). The other volunteers are older, and the clinic staff is cold—especially the suspicious Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington), whose demeanor suggests he’s laced the cheese at the heart of his test subjects’ maze with arsenic.

Of course, this isn’t an above-board scientific research project. Dr. Meyer and his team are looking for something, and they haven’t told their figurative lab rats exactly what it is. Sarah and her fellow patients are fitted with space-age monitoring gear (shades of last year’s Possessor, which would make a fantastic double-bill with Come True). One such device transmits crudely rendered video of the participants’ dream imagery to Meyer and his team.

Because this is a movie, we get the benefit of seeing what the dreamers see in high definition: fantastically creepy tracking shots through Sarah’s thoughts, rendered as a corridor whose periphery is littered with subconscious artifacts. The iconography is mostly recognizable, but we’re left to guess at each item’s significance.

As the sessions go on, a shadowy figure begins to emerge in each of the dreamers’ minds. It manifests at first as a roughly defined silhouette of a man. Through continuous prodding by the scientists (and therefore subconscious focus by the dreamers in their unconscious hours), it takes on a definitive shape. Its eyes come to life and begin looking deeply into the people who’ve awakened it.

That’s about as much as I’m willing to share, plotwise, except to say that Sarah leaves the clinic and develops a very strange relationship with one of the young scientists. Jeremy (Landon Liboiron) takes a liking to Sarah and lets her in on a bit more information than Dr. Meyer would have approved of. This has, frankly, pedestrian ramifications for the story, but it opens up a world of possibilities for the meta-narrative.

You won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a lot more going on in Come True than a simple Evil Scientists and Bogeymen narrative. The first clue is that, though Burns depicts Sarah’s dream state as a haunting tour of unsettling sights and sounds, the conceit itself isn’t very dreamlike. Every dream sequence pushes straight through a house of subconscious horrors as if the mind’s eye were on a dolly track. None of the subjects dream of memories, mundane scenes, or even conversations. For me, this created the nagging sensation of being in a dream when conscious reasoning suddenly kicks in and boots me back into the waking world.

You’ll have to discover the second, third, and fourth clues for yourself. Suffice it to say, this is one of those ballsy brain-ticklers that rewards eagle-eyed audiences. No doubt the film will confound viewers who expect a supernatural horror-thriller in the tradition of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. Come True is more like a dramatic, movie-length version of that film’s dream clinic scene, in which Charles Fleischer explains to Ronee Blakley that no one knows what dreams are or where they come from.

I find dream movies to be infinitely more interesting than virtual reality movies. VR flicks tend to focus on the visuals as a way of underscoring the “anything we can dream, we can create” premise. But given the evidence, almost everyone has the same dreams: big guns, flying fantasies, robots and monsters, etc. The language of virtual reality movies is new and has very few syllables.

Dreams, on the other hand, are ancient and universal in their uniqueness. They bear a context that is inherently intimate, but which can be understood quite easily in dramatic shorthand. There are also different kinds of dreams: dreams before dying; dreams from comas; the inexplicable paradox of power naps whose imaginings take place over hundreds of years.

I’ve been waiting a long time for serious dream movies to make a comeback.

Anthony Scott Burns is beginning to make mine…well, you know…