Back in the early nineties, weirdy-indie band Daisy Chainsaw released their third single Hope All Your Dreams Come True, a song from the more bizarre end of their already-oddball musical spectrum. It was neither a chart nor a critical success, and the indifference that greeted it hastened the group’s demise. It was however a freakishly disturbing and unsettling listen, as a haunting melody unfolds over jagged, fractured sonics.
It’s a record that’s come back to this reviewer’s mind because the song’s emotive atmosphere shares much in common with the mood of a new independent Canadian psychological horror-thriller. Come True is an assured, and extremely unnerving, exploration of how individuals’ perception of their identity, and their anxieties about the things that threaten them, are revealed through the experience of dreaming.
Sarah Dunn is an unhappy and disaffected eighteen-year-old loner. Alienated from her parents, she’s sleeping rough, couch surfing and hanging out with her very few friends. When she learns of a new research project, willing to pay people to monitor them sleeping, she’s instinctively suspicious but she signs up. She soon learns that these researchers have found a way to generate real-time visualisations of sleepers’ dreams. And those dreams include disturbing nightmares, something that Sarah is all too familiar with.
The film steps through the theories of psychologist Carl Jung and his notion of the ‘collective unconscious’, which he believed connects all humans in a shared memory. The story is punctuated by chapter plates that refer to the different ‘archetypes’ that Jung devised to populate his theory. Name-checking Jung in an indie-thriller might invite accusations of pretentiousness and, as it’s not a perspective that the movie relies on consistently, it’s far from an essential inclusion.
The recurring dream sequences at the core of Come True’s narrative are the movie’s boldest moments. Shot in monochrome, with a first-person viewpoint that drifts through near-darkness illuminated only by flickering light, and amplified by scratchy and jarring noises, their effect is cumulatively impressive. And as time goes on, they become ever more alarming. These dreams are experienced first-hand by the sleeping volunteers and observed on monitors by the research team, as the barriers between sleeping and wakefulness become blurred. The ‘real world’ sections of the film also become stranger and less explicable as the film unfolds, and Sarah’s world becomes more disjointed.
Sleep terrors, and the sense that something is waiting for you to close your eyes have featured in films as different as Paperhouse and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But in Come True, the purpose of the premise is not to deliver outright terror but a sickening sense of foreboding. The plot builds towards a finale that, while surprising and unpredictable, is unlikely to please everyone who’s come along for the journey through this dreamscape. And at key moments, the dialogue is not always quite so polished as the cleverly-constructed visuals and soundscape.
But where Come True succeeds completely is in building an atmosphere of mounting dread, and of evoking a sense of a fragile young woman struggling with her dissociation from the world. In a strong ensemble cast, Skylar Radzion shines as the brittle Sarah, while the spectres that appear as ‘the stuff of nightmares’ are more than enough to discourage anyone from taking a quick forty winks.
Release Date: March 15th (digital) / April 5th (UK Limited Edition Blu-ray)
