Come True

2020 ** 1/2

Ugh.  I really thought I'd started out strong, that I was going to lead Horrorthon 2021 with a four-point-five star movie and this year's Hidden Gem! Nnnnnnope.  Come True is a perfect example of what happens when you're 100% prepared to tell 50% of a story.

So much of this movie is promising, in particular the stylized recurring dream images that are the focus of the story.  Eighteen-year-old Sarah is so estranged from her mother she lives like a homeless person, dipping into her house for supplies and then sleeping in the park. What's even more exhausting is that she suffers from recurring nightmares, in which she slowly moves forward through strange landscapes, always eventually coming to a menacing, shadowy figure. 

Then the camera smacks him in the head and Mel Brooks comes out to sing the theme song

The dream sequences are monochrome, creepy, and very beautiful. I welcomed each one.  The constant, steady forward motion made them seem like you were riding a Disneyland dark ride based on the videotape in The Ring.

It's nice to see that thing that killed Tasha Yar getting work

Sarah joins a sleep study, and somewhere in the Hulu info blurb it says "what are they really studying?" or "she's part of a terrible discovery" or whatever, but at this point I don't feel like describing the plot because there is simply no candy in this piñata. The script is good and the cinematography is great and the performances are spot on.  And they totally had me all the way through to this big, unexpected mid-movie crescendo involving some side characters. It's all stroby! and jump cuts! and then right then, in the eye of the storm, here comes the reveal! And there's... no reveal. The lights go out, nothing is explained, none of the characters return to the film again.  Psyche, gotcha, thank you for playing.

This movie comes so not-recommended I'm going to go ahead and spoil the main story below, but if you want to hang on to your ignorance you can stop here.  Short story is, this is a bummer of a misfire. 

This trailer does a decent job capturing the mood of the movie before it started to suck.  I'll start my spoilers below.

Well maybe you weren't going to read my spoilers but you figured the trailer did it for you.  Either way welcome to the grown-up table.

Now strap this thing to your head

So Sarah goes veering off for various misadventures with this Harry Potter-lookin' dude who's on the research team, and she keeps having weird visions of the shadow guy and it's cool.  But this ends with her sleepwalking out of the hospital and refusing to wake up.  Harry Potter follows her and gets his Hermione to show up with some gear so they can watch what she's dreaming.  

I mentioned they could do that, right? No? Pretty sure I did

Anyway after I watch this poor woman stomp around outside in her slippers for ten minutes of screen time, feeling like I'm watching the plot literally wandering away, the scene finally turns into something like a climax, aaand... it gets a little silly but I'm still hanging on, aaand...

And she wakes up, and she's in Harry Potter's apartment, and she's just gouged his eyes out -- and I'm there, hoping, hoping they'll tie it together -- and she goes into the bathroom, and her phone beeps, and you see it's an incoming image, and she puts it down for a sec -- I'm on pins and needles! Can they do it? 

And suddenly in the mirror she realizes she has VAMPIRE TEETH and then we see the phone message and it's a text saying YOU'VE BEEN IN A COMA FOR 20 YEARS and goddamn it goddamn it goddamn it IT WAS ALL A DREAM.  All of it.  Whole movie.  

Slap in the face!