In the Flesh: Come True

Come True isn’t the sort of movie you’d expect to leave you shaken afterward. Its pace is glacial, its story minimal, its characters fairly thinly sketched. The horror comes from the intense pressure it exerts through careful guiding of the viewers’ eye and the slow, inexorable momentum of the camera in its astonishing dream sequences. By the time the film establishes the format of its dreams — a quiet, gliding progress through static scenes of desolate nature and institutional settings broken up by the cloying dark of apertures through which the camera drifts — the atmosphere is so saturated, so defined and curated, that the slightest deviation becomes startling. Figures we glimpse intact recur with strange holes eaten through their bodies. A drifting apparition collapses suddenly in on itself, skin emptying out like a balloon deflating — in Come True’s rarefied atmosphere this simple, almost silent occurrence and others like it become sources of intense anxiety.

That same sense of formless, indeterminate panic drives much of the film’s imagery and structure. Why is Sarah estranged from her mother and living on the street? It doesn’t matter; the point is the cyclical anxiety of finding food, a place to sleep, a way forward through a hostile world. What do the dark figures which appear in the dreams of every participant in the sleep study Sarah turns to in order to secure a bed for herself represent? That they exist at all is statement enough for the film’s purposes, and their unspeaking menace and slow, deliberate movements distill the crushing dread of sleep paralysis into a form at once concrete and unknowable. The scenes in which they manifest in reality, visible only through the lenses of specialized cameras, are some of the film’s most cloyingly tense, the nebulous nature of their threat further obscured by tiny screens and grainy film quality.

Whenever Come True steps back from this particular myopic vein of hyperfocus, its atmosphere slackens. The light tone of its few exposition-heavy scenes drains the tension from otherwise suspenseful sequences, but when it trusts the viewer enough to be silent, or to engage only in elliptical allusions and cryptic non-sequiturs, it soars. The strange proportions of Christopher Heatherington’s worn face caught in the glow of a bank of monitors as he watches dark wonders unfold. The silent awe with which the film unveils its central figure, the shadowy thing at the heart of all dreams, standing in the bedrock of the human subconscious. Burns plays his images of crisis at once vaguely and with undeniably personal intensity, striking at times a perfect balance between some Platonic ideal of fear and the gut-deep terror of trying to exist in a world from which the best you can expect is cold cosmic indifference.