Come True (2020, Anthony Scott Burns)
Come True is a trip of a film, and by that I mean it's about the journey, not the destination. It succeeds in being intriguing, at times scary, and creating an overall feeling like a mystery which is constantly half a step away from being solved, even as each new step in the journey occurs. It succeeds in part because it succeeds at understanding why dreams are able to take us on such strange journeys. As long as there is a moment when we feel a charged emotion of some kind, and what follows is connected to that moment, we are able to keep going along, even if there isn't a strict sense of rationality to to the sequence of events. The dream can keep on changing in ways which have no basis in reality, but we just keep going as if there's nothing unusual about it, because we're emotionally connected to one piece of what we're experiencing.
It's obvious there's an influence on the visual style from the pastel, neon drenched films of Michael Mann, Tony Scott and others who were working in the same style in the 80's, and it works. The use of color as a mechanism for visual storytelling is well deployed. There's also a great sense of imagination at work in the dream sequences we see. They work visually, and they convey the sense of being geographically and physically dislodged in an unusual way.
Julia Sarah Stone playing the lead, Sara, carries the film well. Landon Liboiron, as Jeremy, the sleep researcher who takes an interest in her beyond the professional is also good. Anthony Scott Burns uses the visual language of the film to take the audience from being skeptical of Jeremy to believing Sara has developed a genuine interest in him. He finds an interesting, unusual way to do this, in keeping with what's happening at that point in the film.
The music and the sound design, also very much an update of the 80's aesthetic work really well in this film too. It seems Anthony Scott Burns is a multitalented artist, as he is also responsible for the score, alongside Electric Youth.
If you can "buy the ticket and take the ride" as this film is concerned, there's a lot here to enjoy. For some, the odd logic, the sense of drifting in the story, and the sense of some kind of mystery we can't quite feel the edges of as an audience, might be too much of a stretch. I was on board, pretty much from the first dream sequence, and overall, I enjoyed the ride. I could quibble about the ending, but honestly, this isn't really a movie about the ending, it's about the getting there, which I enjoyed pretty thoroughly.