Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Anthony Scott Burns
Starring: Julia Sarah Stone, Landon Liboiron, Skylar Radzion, Tiffany Helm, Chantal Perron, Tedra
Rogers
Throughout Anthony Scott Burns' Come True, I found myself racking my brains trying to figure out why a recurring
piece of music sounded so familiar. The end credits informed me the track
was the moody 'Coelocanth' by '80s rockers Shriekback and it clicked that I
had always associated it with a scene from Michael Mann's
Manhunter. Burns makes great effort to evoke Mann here, with neon blanketed visuals
accompanied by a synth heavy score by Electric Youth and his own musical
project Pilotpriest. It's a film that's certainly easy on the eyes and ears
but its surface level pseudo-psychology ultimately leaves your mind rumbling
for more brain pudding.
Julia Sarah Stone, a young Canadian actress who impressed in the
otherwise problematic abuse drama Allure, plays Sarah, a troubled college kid who is so desperate to avoid her
mother (for reasons never expounded upon) that she spends her nights
sleeping in a local playground. As you might imagine, this is playing havoc
with her studies, as she struggles to keep her eyes open during the
day.
Sarah seemingly finds a solution to her predicament in the form of an ad
requesting subjects for a sleep study. A good night's sleep and $12 an hour?
It seems like the answer to her prayers, but when Sarah begins the study she
finds herself plunged into a literal nightmare world.
Imagine A Nightmare on Elm Street if Freddy Krueger never
actually materialised but was rather alluded to and occasionally glimpsed
through a digital haze on a bank of monitors. That's essentially what you
get here, as Sarah and her fellow snoozing subjects are visited in their
dreams by the same Slender Man type figure. We're kept guessing throughout
as to just what the origin of this mysterious figure is, leading to an
audience insulting final twist that will have you throwing popcorn at the
screen.
Stone does some fine work in the Heather Langenkamp stand-in role, and
looks convincingly knackered throughout. It's her commitment to the piece
that keeps us on board for so long, even as we reach a point halfway through
where we realise we may be watching a movie that has little to offer beyond
a well-mounted exercise in style. The depiction of Sarah's dreams offers
some haunting Giger-esque imagery of twisted bodies and vaginal entrances,
but there's barely enough substance here to sustain an episode of a TV
horror anthology, let alone a 105 minute feature. File under 'Should have
been a short."
