Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Come True’ on Hulu, a Strangely Enthralling, Hallucinogenic Indie Sci-fi Thriller

Come True — streaming on Hulu — is perfect for the IFC Midnight banner: A creepy small-budget/big-idea sci-fi/horror thriller that’ll play nicely during the bleary wee morning hours. Canadian filmmaker Anthony Scott Burns writes, directs, edits and composes the music for this film, which is a hypnotic provoker digging into the disturbing hallucinogenic stuff of sleep paralysis. If he’s aiming to make us feel half-incepted and more than a little hypnotized, well, mission accomplished.

COME TRUE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: First-person, slow zoom: A mountain, then blackness, then a door, and through it, some monoliths and, finally, a dark human figure. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) awakens from a strange dream. She’s been sleeping on a playground slide. Ominous subtitle: THE PERSONA. Sarah bicycles home, watches from afar as her mother leaves the house, then goes in, showers, makes coffee and heads to school, where she tends to nod off in class. There’s a Weekend at Bernie’s poster on her bedroom wall. Is this relevant? Sarah carries herself like someone who’s disconnected from the life of an average high-schooler. She seems weary, tired, troubled. She meets her best friend Zoe (Tedra Rogers) at a coffeehouse, where she sees a flyer on a bulletin board seeking subjects for a sleep study at a nearby university. Clearly, something ails her; maybe this will help?

Another portentous subtitle: THE ANIMA AND THE ANIMUS. Sarah shows up for the sleep study. A few other people are also participating. Anita (Carlee Ryski) has her wear a weird bodysuit and soft helmet, and wires her to equipment on the wall. Jeremy (Landon Liboiron) sits at a bank of monitors and a desk full of knobs and sliders. Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington) oversees the operation through giant Coke-bottle eyeglasses. Sarah asks some questions and all the replies are the same: “We can’t tell you that.” The first night seems to go well — Sarah is refreshed and smiling in the morning. She goes to a bookstore, pages through a Philip K. Dick novel, and a nice man nearby talks it up to her. Is this relevant? Probably more relevant than a Weekend at Bernie’s reference, but who knows. She goes to a crazy slasher movie, and the same guy is there. Hmm.

The second night of the study doesn’t go nearly as well. During her morning interview, Anita shows Sarah some abstract images. She has no reaction until the last one, an image of the dark human figure we previously saw in her dream, provokes a full-on panic attack. Sarah later realizes the guy who’s been lightly stalking her is Jeremy, who sure seems to be crossing the line of objective scientific study. She confronts him. She wants to know what this strange sleep study is all about. Will he have any satisfying answers? Does a poster of The Terminator in Jeremy’s office carry any relevance? Why do her dreams look like byzantine art installations rendered with CGI? Who, or what, is that creepy figure in her dreams? Here, have another (but not the last) sinister subtitle: THE SHADOW.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Burns dilutes the dream-horror surrealism of David Lynch (think Mulholland Dr.) and the nightmarescapes of Jonathan Glazer (think Under the Skin), arriving at a low-budget ambitiousness recalling the low-budget can-do creativity and spirit, if not the tightness or cleverness, of The Vast of Night. And Come True is occasionally soundtracked with the type of vacu-pop that can only be described as Nicolas Winding-Refnesque.

Performance Worth Watching: Without Stone as its earnest and sympathetic core, this movie would likely fall apart.

Memorable Dialogue: Dr. Meyer tries to correct the ethical failures of his staff: “Let’s go back to acting like scientists, OK?”

Sex and Skin: A touch of lady nudeness; an awkward, overstylized and hilariously bad PG-13 sex scene.

Our Take: If you want to delve into Jungian theory (that’s where those chapter titles come from) and/or the unsettling real-life phenomenon of sleep paralysis, there’s a scene in Come True where the characters follow a sleepwalker off the road and into the literal weeds. Although we may intuit it, the movie doesn’t reveal itself as a puzzle to be solved until the final moments, when you’re likely to either shrug your shoulders or be compelled to watch the movie all over again to suss out the clues. I’m on the fence — sometimes it seems to be a collection of teasers and provocations that might make sense if you put forth the effort of interpretation, but it also might be a bunch of red herrings for red herrings’ sake. And whether it’s actually about anything beyond its own machinations is debatable; despite its occasional visceral scares, it ultimately feels like an intellectual exercise.

On the positive end, Burns shrewdly and skillfully cultivates an eerie atmosphere that keeps us compelled, and maybe a little entranced, by what’s going on. Refn frequently calls himself a “fetish” filmmaker — Cronenberg and Kubrick absolutely were — and one senses similar aspirations from Burns. Come True has a (lightly) bleeding eyeball or two and some anachronistic clickity-clack plugs-and-switches technology that seems too analog for modern scientists to be using, but it creates a tactile sensation that keeps the film’s ethereal and anti-logical elements from being too disconnected from recognizable reality.

Burns exercises restraint, maybe to a fault, erring on the side of suggestiveness; he has yet to master the precision and timing of his influences, who fully understand the effect of shock value on the audience — and a good, righteous blast of gooey practical effects. (Burns aims to haunt us with his nightmare imagery, but it’s too lo-fi digital to be indelibly haunting.) Come True might not be fully functional in a narrative sense, but there’s much to admire in its restless ambition, its attempt to avoid recycling familiar concepts.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Come True is enough of an enthralling mystery, and shows enough flashes of inspiration, to make it worth a watch — with the lights off, if you’re not easily spooked.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Come True

Watch Come True on Hulu