Wide Awake

Film: Come True
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t remember his dreams. I can recall glimpses of them now and then, but in general, I recall virtually nothing from wherever my mind goes at night. Dreams are fascinating, though, because it seems like anything can happen in your dreams. You can be back in high school, or chased by a chainsaw-wielding clown…or both. Come True is a movie that explores that place and posits the possibility of things from the real world moving into the dream world, and vice versa. As someone who has struggled with insomnia in the past, that world of dreams is both a desired destination and a little terrifying.

Sara Dunn (Julia Sarah Stone) is a high school student who is essentially homeless. She avoids her mother, but sneaks into the family home to steal food. At night, she sleeps rough in a sleeping back or in the homes of friends. Her situation causes her to frequently fall asleep in class, and when she does fall asleep, she is plagued by dreams of a maze and a shadowy figure with glowing eyes.

Looking for a more stable situation, Sara signs up for a two-month long sleep study that will give her a regular place to sleep. However, the only other woman in the study backs out shortly after it begins. Worse, Sara discovers that one of the scientists, Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), who is called “Riff” as the assistant to the head scientist, has been following her. In one of her sessions, Sara has a panic attack when she is shown a picture of the creature she has been seeing in her dreams. Ultimately, she uses Riff’s stalking of her to leverage information—she says she will remove herself from the study if he doesn’t tell her what is going on. To keep her in the study, he tells her that the patients are having their dreams monitored by a scanning device that turns brainwaves into images. Essentially, they are watching her dreams.

From here, nothing really good happens, as Sara’s world continues to crumble around her. Part o this is the fact that evidently, the other people in the study are seeing the same shadow figures with glowing eyes that she is. In her continued time with Riff, the lines between the waking world and the dream world become more and more blurred, and what should be a part of the dream world may not be, and what happens in the real world may actually be the dream.

The thing that I like about Come True is that it is incredibly ambitious. This is clearly not a high-budget movie, but it really wants to involve the audience in something that is very dark and upsetting. It reminds me of a film like Absentia, which made an effort to genuinely pull the audience into a very dark story, and did so without any real budget to speak of. Come True is very specifically hazy and dark. We don’t get a lot of good looks at much of anything. It opaque on purpose. We’re not supposed to see things clearly, because the entire point is that we can’t really see what is happening.

A lot of what make Come True work is the performance of Julia Sarah Stone, who needs to be sympathetic to the audience, but also a person who is not quite understandable. Since Sara doesn’t know what she is going through, we’re not really supposed to know either. All we know is that everything feels claustrophobic. Sara doesn’t have a way to escape what is happening, and neither do we in the audience.

Come True is the sort of film that isn’t going to make or break the actors on the screen, but it might get some attention for the screenwriter/director. It’s a smart movie, but it’s also one that could well be frustrating for a lot of the audience.

This is worth tracking down, although it’s not essential viewing. If nothing else, it’s worth watching as a way to get some additional views for a director and a cast that could use them.

Why to watch Come True: It’s dark in the right way.
Why not to watch: The ending might feel like a cop out.