Mark Reviews Movies: STRAWBERRY MANSION

Strawberry Mansion, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

The story of Strawberry Mansion revolves around dreams, and the screenplay by co-director Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney follows the mysterious logic and slim but open-ended purpose of a dream. The movie gives us plenty of weird and cleverly manufactured visuals, but its devotion to a thin plot and broad ideas means that this exercise in hand-crafted imagination doesn't amount to much more than that.

Audley also stars as James Preble, a dream auditor who ensures that people are properly taxed for the content their sleeping minds produce. His latest assignment sends him to the eponymous home of Arabella (Penny Fuller), an older woman who has never paid taxes on her dreams but does have about 2,000 video cassettes filled with them. By invitation, James sets himself up in a guest room of the woman's mansion and gets to work watching, auditing, and trying to make sense of Arabella's dreams.

The big idea here is that, if dreams have become commodities of sorts, there's room to exploit them. Arabella has a theory, developed with her late second husband, that companies insert advertising into dreams. While James denies that as a possibility, the lonely guy certainly does dream often of a best friend (played by Linas Phillips), who shows up with products to solve all kinds of problems or to share a bucket of fried chicken. Arabella, to whose younger self (played by Grace Glowicki) James develops a noticeable attraction, seems to have found a way to block the marketing.

The worlds of the movie—the real one and the ones of dreams—are curiously and inventively created, with the retro-futuristic reality taking on a dim and soft-focused look, while the realm of dreams use assorted tricks that give the visions a grounded, homemade, and almost theatrical appearance. People show up with the heads of animals, like a giant papier-mâché frog head on waiter, or a lengthy sequence involving James' encounters with a skull-faced fire demon, rising out of the sea on during a long ship voyage (Both of those creatures are played by the other filmmaker).

It's clear that a lot of effort and thoughtfulness went into these designs, but the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Audley and Birney's narrative. It's a mishmash of a conspiracy—involving Arabella's corporate-minded son Peter (Reed Birney)—that only scratches the surface of its overt satire, a character study of Audley's isolated auditor, and a romance that apparently goes beyond age, time, and the veil between the real world and dreams.

If Strawberry Mansion doesn't make much sense, that's almost to be expected, given its fantastical ventures into the world of the subconscious. As for its lack of much thematic or emotional grounding, that's what undoes the movie's ambitions.

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