[Film Review] Come True (2021)

Vivid and lucid dreaming is often described as something to be marvelled at, the wonder of the mind conjuring beautiful imagery without needing to have beared witness to anything of influence.

However for those who experience this type of dreaming, that can often be far from the truth, with the mind portraying disturbing imagery that can leave the dreamer waking in a state of sleep deprivation, sheer exhaustion and often emotionally drained. In Anthony Scott Burns 2020 sci-fi horror film, Come True, the reality of lucid dreaming and suffering from sleep paralysis is explored in a visually stunning landscape, but with some many ideas being transformed to screen, does it manage to do so without confusion?

Sarah has run away from home and spends her nights curled up in a sleeping bag, trying to find rest at the end of a children’s slide in a park. During the day, she fights against the sleep deprivation that is ravaging her life; taking any moment between school classes to try and catch up on the sleep debt she has accrued or drinking copious amounts of caffeine to try and substitute a much needed night of rest. When she coincidentally stumbles across a flyer in the coffee shop to take part in a sleep study, it seems like the ample opportunity to find out the causes of her insomnia and finally have a place to rest that doesn’t involve her going home. Once in the study however, it seems that something within her dreams have been awoken and so begins a descent into the hellspace that is her imagination. 

Come True immediately presents the audience with a multitude of different theories, ideas and conclusions which we start to draw from the moment we float through one of  Sarah’s bleak dreams. At first, it seems as though the film is set to begin exploring the territories of personal trauma and how the mind translates emotions, stress and anxiety into dreams to allow the person a form of escapism from those feelings and to wake up feeling as if those emotions have been decoded in some form or another. We find that Sarah has run away from home, and seeming absolutely desperate to escape that home life, it looks as though we and the scientists will discover the truth behind her condition after all, however the film avoids going down the trauma route completely. 

Instead, the film leads us deeper and deeper into the subconscious of the human mind and begins to navigate its way through these nightmares which are a collective happening among all of the patients in the sleep study. We pass through the realm of merely a singular experience and into a shared one, which eventually leads Come True to a narrative around sleep paralysis and shadow people. This phenomena has been occurring on screen and off screen for some time, and continues to awaken a sense of fear in those who experience this real wonder and even those who don’t, with questions on why paralysis happens and why nearly everyone says they see these shadow people. Even though Come True begins to explore this, there never feels like a true conclusion and elements of this begin to get a little blurry and convoluted as the story twists and turns into directions that never quite make sense. 

Visually the film is celestial; transporting us to hellish dreamscapes which pull inspiration from horror games such as Silent Hill with silent humanoid bodies hanging in distorted positions with nothing but imagination to tether them to their surroundings. The illusion of dreaming is translated to screen with the utmost understanding of the beauty, reality and pure horror that nightmares can bring to the person experiencing them, which allows the us to feel swallowed by these passages of dreaming and gain a deeper understanding of how they might affect a person’s waking mental health. But it’s not just during the dream sequences that we are allowed to be spectators to stunning imagery. The cinematography is breath-taking, even during the waking moments of the film with dreamlike shots  and colours that emanate the emotions of characters, filling the screen in dusty blue hues and visceral pink tones. Even if you are finding yourself a little confused by the story, you can easily get lost in how aesthetically pleasing this film is. 

Come True presents many ideas to the audience throughout the entirety of the film, yet never commits itself fully to any of these hypotheses until the very end, concluding on one that felt overly scripted. Even though it is a different concept to many other films that analyse sleep paralysis and the unconscious human psyche, the results come back with anomalies throughout. That being said, this confusion does make the film itself feel like a waking nightmare, one that the audience cannot escape from, paralysed in front of our screens. Come True might not provide any closure to the audience, but you’ll easily lose your sense of being watching this one. 

Come True is available on Digital Download from 15th March 2021 and available on Limited Edition Blu-Ray from 5th April 2021

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