Canada. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay/Photography – Anthony Scott Burns, Story – Anthony Scott Burns & Daniel Wessenberger, Producers – Steve Hoban, Brent Kawchuk & Mark Smith, Music – Electric Youth & Pilotpriest. Production Company – Copperheart Entertainment/Angel Entertainment/Telefilm Canada.
Cast
Julia Sarah Stone (Sarah Dunn), Landon Liboiron (Jeremy), Carlee Ryski (Anita), Tedra Rogers (Zoe), Christopher Heatherington (Dr Meyer)
Plot
Eighteen year-old Sarah Dunn is a runway from home who sleeps in the park or at her friend’s place, all while still attending school. She finds an ad for a scientific study into sleep research and signs up. There she and the other volunteers are put to sleep while wearing suits that monitor their activity. However, as Sarah befriends and later becomes involved with Jeremy, one of the assistants, she discovers that the scientists are trying to perfect a device that allows them to view people’s dreams and that this has opened up something disturbing inside her.
Anthony Scott Burns is a Canadian director who has risen up through the industry directing various short films, working as a musician, visual effects supervisor and second unit director. He previously directed the Father’s Day segment of the horror anthology Holidays (2016) and then the feature-length horror film Our House (2018).
Come True starts out seeming interesting. Julia Sarah Stone is quite a different horror heroine than usual – she’s a runaway from home (peculiarly the film never goes into any of the reasons why she has run away) and comes with a tomboyish look that gives her the appearance of gender neutrality. She signs up to a mysterious dream research program that begins delving into her memories where the controllers soon consider her a subject of fascination. There is an experimental technology that can visualise dreams. The dreams we see come with lighting levels reduced to the point that they almost take place in total darkness with occasional white outlines in the gloom.
The middle of the film turns into lots of drama as Julia Sarah Stone and Landon Liboiron team up to investigate … something going on with her dreams that has been brought out by the process. Anything more than that it is not easy to say. This feels like a film that generates much mood, atmosphere and dramatic tension out of things happening at the same time as it is spinning its tires with the brakes on. It is all faux dramatic tension without the slightest clue what it is that the people are actually dealing with.
The problem with the film is that for almost the entire running time is not clear what is going on – like who the people with glowing eyes that appear in the black gloom are, for instance. The latter sections of the film have Landon Liboiron and Carlee Ryski following Julia Sarah Stone as she wanders around in a sleepwalking state with monitoring equipment attached to her head. This leads them to a field, which appears as a tower in the video monitoring the dream. Julia wakes up from the dream and finds her missing cellphone in the field.
Then comes the most confusing part. [PLOT SPOILERS] We next see Julia resting in a bed in a room where she gets up and goes into the bathroom. In the mirror, we see that she now has vampire fangs. The last image of the film is a text appearing on her phone telling her that she has been in a coma for twenty years (despite the fact that earlier in the film, she had told us she was only eighteen years old). WTF does any of this mean? I have no idea.
Trailer here