COME TRUE is a maddening film. It’s an atmospheric Canadian indie sci-fi horror with some beautiful visuals and a truly haunting score (one of the best since Donnie Darko). But damn, it really goes off the rails at the end – literally on the last shot.
It centres on a teenage girl, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) who enters into a mysterious sleep studies experiment in the hope it will help her overcome the terrible nightmares that haunt her dreams. Naturally, it’s not long before it all goes a bit weird – reality and the dreamworld start to overflow each other’s borders.
There’s a minimalist cool vibe to the whole thing, and striking photography by director (and writer/editor/musician/vfx artist) Anthony Scott Burns. I’ve been listening to his music for years – he writes under the name PILOTPRIEST – and he’s insanely talented. But the screenplay just doesn’t quite work. There’s a couple of places where it feels like this film truly needs to embrace the horror – and maybe even introduce some Cronenberg-style body horror and gore. But it feels like it always pulls back, instead of ramping up. And no more so than the aforementioned ending, which literally made me say “Whut?” 🙁
Still, it’s worth a watch if you want to see some minimalist creepy dreamlike sci fi. It’s like if David Lynch or Nicolas Winding Refn directed DREAMSCAPE, by way of FLATLINERS, ALTERED STATES and VIDEODROME.
And damn… that score.
