Come True (2020)

Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) is in a state of being something of a half-runaway. Sneaking into her home from time to time when she knows her mother isn’t there to cop some food or a shower, she sleeps in the bedroom of what seems to be her only friend at school when she’s lucky, and outside when she’s not. The film never really outright says what kind of abuse she’s avoiding, but it can’t be pretty.

Giving her precarious state outside of school, it looks like a bit of a godsend to the teenager when she sees an advert for a sleep study, that’ll get her a bit of money as well as quite a few nights in a very safe environment. Or what should be a safe environment, for as it turns out, this isn’t quite a typical sleep study. For some reason, the subjects of the study seem to share the exact same nightmares, nightmares that seems to increasingly trickle into their waking lives, until Sarah gets into mortal danger.

If nothing else, Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True is certainly the best film in the small horror sub-genre of contemporary films fascinated with sleep experiments (still waiting on a Russian movie about that sort of thing, obviously) and/or sleep paralysis.

Kidding aside, the film’s at the very least a minor gem (I’d argue a major one), shot in a style somewhat evoking early to middle period Cronenberg - like quite a few films have done in the last couple of years - through a certain visually expressed coldness. It’s – again like most of its stylistic brethren – not a simple stylistic derivative, for Burns shows quite bit more compassion for Sarah’s suffering, physical and metaphysical, than you’d get from Cronenberg and uses the distancing effect coming with the style to avoid sentimentality, but not sentiment.

The clinical style is also very useful when it comes to presenting the – brilliantly conceived yet budget-consciously minimalist – effects of the abnatural on the world and the characters. The film’s seeming objectivity makes most of its horror set pieces very convincing indeed. Most of the horror feels very much of a piece with that objectivity, presenting the influx of the irrational in a very rational manner, which is an uncommon approach for dream-based movies – which do tend to the consciously surreal – and turns out to be very effective indeed in Burns’s hands.

Some of the concepts the script (by Burns and Daniel Weissenberger) uses are rather wonderful indeed, certainly again suggesting the shadow of Cronenberg, but also of the more science fictional arm of weird fiction, and the fusion of that into creepypasta. There’s a very well developed sense of strangeness running through the film, yet a strangeness that doesn’t seem random but coherent and logical in the same way systems of the occult can feel coherent and logical even though they are irrational.

There are flaws here, of course. Most obviously, there’s a really ill-advised as well as unconvincing romance to suffer through that feels painfully tacked on and rather inadvertently uncomfortable. On the plus side, the ending of the romance does provide the film with one of its most haunting images in the end, so it’s not completely useless.

Some of the acting also feels a little off, with some of the actors in minor roles making peculiar decisions in their line readings as well as in their body language. Though, given the very peculiar and sudden double twist ending of the film, this might very well have been a purposeful decision from the filmmakers; it does certainly add to the strangeness of mood that increases the longer the film goes on.

Not at all awkward is Stone’s performance. As a matter of fact, it’s rather on the riveting side, carrying the film over its more implausible or distanced moments with its humanity, and keeping this as far away from the sort of horror film where you can’t wait to see the characters die as possible.

That all of this clearly has been realized on a minor budget is a little wonder indeed, turning Come True into quite the surprise for this jaded viewer of movies concerning sleep experiments and sleep paralysis.