‘Come True’ could be seen as another horror movie that looks at 80s nostalgia for ‘Stranger Things’ or the new ‘Ghostbusters: Beyond’ (Ghostbusters: Afterlife, 2021) but it actually moves at a more angle. akin to that of Panos Cosmatos or Brandon Cronenberg. Released without much noise at Movistar + last year, it remains as one of the most fascinating movies of recent months.
Anthony Scott Burns had already visited the eighties worlds with the very worthy ‘Our House’ (2018) which remains among the highlights of 2018 and here he repeats on the soundtrack with the Synthwave Electric Youth group, the authors of the famous songs of ‘Drive’ (2011), with whom he has once again handwritten the pieces that make up the music of ‘Come True’ long before he started shooting the film.
It can be said that the work began with the roof, but the influence of sound and previous design defines the experience of the film, a journey with experimental airs and the vocation of a great video clip of terrifying sensations. Produced with a team of 4 people apart from actors, with the director doing countless tasks at the same time, it is not the classic film that any studio would produce and yet its appearance is not only competent but is proposed as a beautiful visual experience.
Night terrors
‘Come True’ is unclassifiable, on the one hand it is a journey of dreamlike horror to the bottom of adolescent anxieties, with a series of hypnotic surreal scenes, full of shadows that can give the creeps to the victims of night terrors, but that will surely delight fans of video games like ‘Silent Hill’, since they discover an unknown world, of which nothing is explained to us but we can identify as an infernal dimension of nightmares.
His story is told through a teenage girl who participates in a kind of dream experiment that fits into the retro science fiction of ‘Tron’ (1982), although its tone is that of a dark teenage drama like ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001 ) under the filter of independent author terrors that have been transforming the genre in recent years as works like ‘It Follows’ (2014). But Burns had already shown that he had a voice of his own in its segment for the anthology ‘Holidays’ (2016), a great little gem of cosmic horror, told from parental intimacy and old-fashioned audio technology.
This time he enters the terror young adult and lowfi science fiction rescuing ideas from the forgotten apocryphal inspiring of ‘Origen’ (Inception, 2010), the stupendous’ The great escape ‘(Dreamscape, 1984), also key in the design of the dream experiments of’ Monsters in the night ‘(Nightwish, 1991) and in his visual approach, points to actual descriptions of nighttime visitors of sleep paralysis victims from the terrifying documentary ‘The Nightmare’ (2015).
Mind-blowing journey to the bottom of nightmares
Burns is in no rush to answer questions and works more on the moods and the color range limited to blues and blacks of the fevered dark spiral of its protagonist, whose dysfunctional relationships form an ethereal collage with a consciously blurred beginning and end. It also stylistically connects with the aforementioned ‘Our House’, which mixed the supernatural terror and science fiction of Amblin echoes with some mysterious dark entities that could coexist in this same universe.
For some reason ‘Come True’ is full of nods to George A. Romero, from the appearance of ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) in a cinema, to the T-shirt worn by the protagonist or even the glasses of one of the characters, but their enigmas do not invite us to do that reaction, but actually tends to a psychological horror that tries to play with identity. During his footage, he places clues with Jung’s concepts of anima and animus, inviting the film’s interpretations to be compared with the identity of the unconscious.
‘Come True’ is a fascinating work that has suffered a poor premiere in countries like Spain and the consequent lack of attention in the networks in its premiere on platforms, but the snub of these when it comes to advertising it does not reflect the uniqueness of a proposal that, although somewhat damaged by its lazy ending, is one of the most obsessive experiences of the year. 2021, a ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) for generation z that will accumulate fans over time.