Review: Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True Eerily Captures the Ambiance of Dreams

Come True offers a glimpse of a world where screens are pores in the boundary between dreams and waking life.

Come True
Photo: IFC Films

Cinemagoers have remarked on the dreamlike quality of film since the medium’s inception, yet commercial films about dreams that manage to capture something of their ambience remain few and far between. Dreams, after all, tend to repulse the coherence that’s the default mode of narrative cinema. Writer-director Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True, it’s safe to say, is among those few, but in contrast to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which revels in the anarchic freedom of lucid dreaming, it specializes in the sense of powerlessness that makes nightmares so terrifying, stressing the horror side of horror sci-fi.

The film’s angst-ridden protagonist, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), has a virtually nonexistent relationship with her parents and atrocious sleep hygiene, having developed the habit of sneaking out at night to bed down on a playground slide. Her recurring dreams feature a shadowy silhouette, the sight of which awakens her, and Burns takes advantage of her broken circadian rhythm to soak much of the film in the liminal half-light of predawn or dusk. Burns, a musician in addition to a director, makes contributions to the film’s mostly ambient score, which, like an ant, pulls many times its own weight in evoking an otherworldly atmosphere, while at the same time providing continuity between the fragments of Sarah’s waking life.

When the opportunity arises for Sarah to join a paid sleep study at the local university, she seizes it as a means of further distancing herself from her parents. Come True regards the university’s brutalist architecture, a modernist dream made literally concrete, as downright dystopian. Sarah and her fellow participants don sleep suits specially designed for the study: sleek exoskeletons hooked into banks of machinery by umbilical cords of tangled wire. This costume design is evocative of spacesuits, reframing sleep as a form of (inner) space travel, an expedition into unknown reaches. There’s a dubious tinge to the study, however, and Burns distills the unease inherent to double-blindness, showing how power imbalances can crop up when only a select few know the real purpose of an experiment.

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As if by chance, one of the grad students running the experiment, Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), meets Sarah at a bookstore, offering a seemingly innocent recommendation of Philip K. Dick. Later, he stalks her at a screening of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. When she confronts him, he reveals that the study is designed to test a new technology that allows them to “decode” their test-subject’s dreams and view them in digital form. In other words, he has been watching her dreams. When the study goes awry, unforeseen horrors ensue.

Naturally, the dream sequences that punctuate this narrative take pride of place. Burns trades jump scares for slow POV tracking shots, their inexorable drifting movement plunging us into shadows where Jungian archetypes hang upside down and the silhouette awaits with glowing eyes. This device reproduces the feebleness experienced during sleep paralysis, that state in which the dreamer is, say, confronted by an incubus, and attempts to scream or jerk awake but finds their muscles unresponsive. (Burns also reworks the incubus myth with a disturbing sex scene that hinges on a semblance between sexual assault and demonic possession.)

Rather than subjecting dreams to the logic of narrative cinema, which would neutralize their potential to both fascinate and terrorize, Burns allows his subject matter to suggest all manner of formal deviations from genre expectations. Come True offers a glimpse of a world where screens are pores in the boundary between dreams and waking life. As sci-fi extrapolations go, this one is slighter than it seems, but in its dual function as horror, it displays a healthy ambivalence toward the power of cinema to make dreams, and nightmares, come true.

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Score: 
 Cast: Julia Sarah Stone, Landon Liboiron, Carlee Ryski, Tedra Rogers, Christopher Heatherington  Director: Anthony Scott Burns  Screenwriter: Anthony Scott Burns  Distributor: IFC Midnight  Running Time: 120 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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