Mark Reviews Movies: DREAM HORSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

"Can't be too bad," graffiti on an abandoned shop posits. "The pigeons keep coming back."

Things are still pretty rough in the small Welsh town where Dream Horse is primarily set. Many of the local shops are closed, although two a chain store and a co-cop provide the groceries. Animals wander the streets, as strays do in any area of some population, but we're not talking about dogs and cats. There are stray horses that Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) passes in the morning on her way to work at the grocery store. It's the first of her two regular jobs. The second one is at a place almost as important as the grocers in such a town: the local pub.

This is a place, not only of broken industry and enterprise, but also of shattered hopes and possibilities. Everybody just kind of gets by without much struggle, but that's only because there's nothing toward which to struggle.

Jan and her husband Brian (Owen Teale), who are both now in their late 40s, once lived a freer and more productive life, raising animals and a family, but there's not much space on their property for many animals. The ducks keep getting some kind of infection on their feet, so they stay in boxes in the house while recovering.

It's some company, at least. The kids have grown, moving out and on with their lives. Jan works mornings and evenings, and she can only reminisce about the long-gone days of her happier family or her childhood of breeding pigeons and dogs with her father. Brian spends his time, when not tending to the few animals the couple has, plopped in front of the television.

We look at these two, and there's a sense that everyone else in town lives according to some variation of the couple's lives. That's the strength of Neil McKay's screenplay, which eventually becomes about a race horse and its impact on the syndicate of locals who own it and the town in general, but even as this story becomes a bit too preoccupied with the horse and the winding path of its career at the races, McKay and director Euros Lyn don't lose sight of the loneliness, the desperation, and the general melancholy of this town and its population.

In this tale, the horse is a horse, of course, meaning that its story is one of a gradual rise in racing, the promise of immediate success, an unexpected downfall, and a climax revolving around the potential for a triumphant comeback. This horse is also a lot more for these characters: It's something toward which they actually can struggle. It has been so long for so many of these people to have a reason to keep going, beyond the grind of the mundane and the necessary, and at its best, this movie captures that sense of joy of finally having something to which to look forward.

It all starts as a lark of sorts, when Jan overhears Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), a man who works a desk job tending to the financials of people much richer than him, wax nostalgic about the time he co-owned a race horse as part of a syndicate. That's something Jan could organize with some of the locals, so she puts together a budget, buys an affordable mare, finds a stallion with some past success, and sets up a meeting for anyone interested in chipping in £10 a week for expenses of raising, boarding, and training a race horse. Enough people—all of them including Howard, hoping for something to break up the monotony of their lives—agree.

The syndicate names the newborn foal "Dream Alliance," and even locals without a financial stake in its success visit the horse. Eventually, Jan and Howard arrange for Dream to receive race training at an elite facility. Its career begins, and the members of the syndicate, enjoying the chance to hobnob with the upper class and celebrities, start to feel a renewed sense of purpose and accomplishment.

That second part is the story that really matters here, since there's nothing new or particularly engaging about Dream's racing career. The filmmakers seem to understand that at first. The story's focus barely shifts from the town in the early stages, leaving the horse's success to dialogue and newspaper clippings following an initial race sequence.

With that time devoted to these characters, we get an admirable sense of people who, finally given the chance to feel some hope and purpose, come to realize how much they've missed in life—and how much there's still to experience. The horse is less a physical presence, with a story of its own, and more an unseen but constantly felt symbol for these characters. While most of the syndicate members are presented for comic relief or sentimentality or conflict, the three major ones—Jan, Brian, and Howard—feel authentic in their everyday challenges and opportunities for change.

McKay's screenplay does make a pretty drastic shift as those matters start to resolve. The horse and its career take a much more substantial focus, giving us lengthy race after race (Lyn and cinematographer Erik Wilson do shoot them with clarity and visual dynamism). Dream Horse stops feeling like a story about real characters with real concerns, as the horse, not the people, becomes the movie's source of inspiration.

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