Mark Reviews Movies: COME TRUE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 11, 2021

Writer/director Anthony Scott Burns has created a tantalizing premise for a horror story about primal fears, expressed through dreams that may or may not have actual, tangible effects in the real world. In its best moments, Come True taps into that dread—the notion of universally shared nightmares—and that sense of confusion—whether or not that universality means there's a foundation in reality to those nightmares. On a more fundamental level, there's a primary dramatic question being asked here: Can those dreams hurt us, whether they're real or not?

Burns' movie is eerie to be sure, especially when it takes us through tours of the protagonist's sleeping mind. There are long hallways, spiraling staircases, doors and dark holes, giant open spaces, and empty voids littered with stone pillars. Amidst the gloomy monochrome of these places are bodies, frozen in space and time—sometimes in uncomfortable positions, curled or bent, or in unnatural states, with their heads stuck inside the walls of one of those halls.

At the end of these sojourns through sleep, there is only one end: a gaunt, shadowy figure, with its body hunched and its face obscured in the darkness. What would we see if it turned around to face us? What would we do if we could see through the silhouette and look upon its face? What terror would result if that face gazed back at us?

There is such striking, discomforting imagery here, but it's employed, unfortunately, for a story that never quite decides what it wants to be. Burns' command of atmosphere, even when the movie isn't looking inside a world of dreams, is certain and admirable. The whole affair, though, seems to be trying to find a reason for its mood of gloom and uncertainty as it goes.

The dreamer is Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), an 18-year-old high school student who has run away from home (for unknown and unknowable reasons, because the character really is just a hollow avatar for the story) and sleeps in a neighborhood park. She is having those strange dreams of halls and doors and that obscure figure, and it's obviously giving her difficulty with sleep.

One day, she finds a flyer for a sleep study being conducted by a local college. It pays, and it guarantees that Sarah will have a bed in which to sleep for the duration of the study. She signs up and is selected to participate.

There really isn't much in the way of story beyond that. We learn nothing about Sarah, except that she is alone, drinks a lot of coffee, and has these dreams. We learn only a little about the study itself, because the people running it don't want to bias the results. Sarah and her fellow participants are dressed in bulky pajamas and connected to some sensors for various readings of brain waves and physiology. They sleep. Sarah's dreams continue, and one morning, one of the student scientists shows her a series of pictures (The cold and sterile air of the lab, with its fluorescent lighting and glowing monitors, is pretty uncomfortable, too).

One of those images causes Sarah to have a panic attack. It looks like the silhouetted face of the figure in her dreams.

We do eventually learn what the study is and how it's accomplished, thanks to Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), an apparent stranger who seems to be following Sarah by day but is actually one of the researchers in the sleep study by night. He gives her the lowdown: The professor (played by Christopher Heatherington) in charge of the study has developed technology that translates the brainwaves of REM sleep into real-time imagery. The figure from Sarah's dreams isn't unique to her, either. Everyone in the study is seeing the same, mysterious thing.

Burns kind of leans into the obvious consequences of this revelation, as it seems that the figure does or can exist outside of the dream world. There's one particularly unnerving sequence in which one of the researchers checks on a pair of subjects sleeping in the same room. Their eyes are wide open, as if in the state of a waking nightmare, and from the monitors in another room, we can see that silhouette standing behind the researcher. Because we can see the room from two different perspectives, we gradually realize that the figure is standing in a specific place within the space.

The filmmaker's refusal to embrace the obvious (The scene ends without any kind of resolution) is both admirable and frustrating. It keeps us on our toes, for sure, as the story leaves the relative safety of the study and takes Sarah, along with Jeremy, into the bigger world with her nightmares. The other consequence of that tendency to keep things uncertain, though, is that the whole point of all of this remains an open question (An answer arrives at the very end, but it leaves us with an assortment of additional questions).

The movie is so inexact in what it's doing and what it's trying to say that we're left with little grounding for its sense of fear and its ideas. Come True, then, ultimately feels like a shallow, ill-defined experiment in mood.

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