Come True

Come True is a Canadian psychological sci-fi / horror available for digital download from the 15th March about a school girl suffering from a sleeping disorder who signs up to a scientific sleep study that does more than just check her R.E.M. frequency.

Set in the present day with a sense of the future it begins inside the dreams of a young girl, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), who has been having some dark dreams with a repeated shadow figure appearing in them. She’s sleeping rough and having to make some stealth visits home, as for some unbeknown reason, she is avoiding her parents. Her problematic sleeping troubles mean she is struggling at school and socially. She stubbles across an advertisement on a cafe noticeboard looking for trialists to take part in a sleep study and grabs this gift wrapped opportunity with both hands, to get paid to sleep.

The sleep laboratory tests get under way and she is part of a small group of applicants who are put in rooms to sleep, slipping on some smartly designed pyjama space suits that will monitor their sleeping behaviour. To begin with there seems nothing out of the ordinary as the scientists and lab technicians go about their observations, taking their vital readings but when the psychological tests afterwards have an adverse reaction on Sarah, she’s keen to pull out of the experiment.

She has an admirer in one of the nerdy scientists Riff (Landon Liboiron) and when her condition gets worse she wants to know what they have been doing and she persuades him to give her an explanation, and in exchange she’ll rejoin the experiment. He reveals to her that with the technology they have, they are able to process the mind’s information into actual moving images and are capable of seeing people’s dreams on monitors, as they fall into the hypnogogic state of sleep.

The CGI dream sequences are dark and foreboding and as a sci-fi horror it maintains an intriguing and slightly disturbing undertone, with some primordial shadow figures appearing in the dreams, although without ever going overboard. The film score has an eerie pop-synth from Electric Youth and Burns that adds to the films stylised cohesiveness.

Directed and edited by Anthony Scott Burns it has a minimalistic retro feel that gives a unsettling insight into the debilitating effects of insomnia. It conjures images of several films in the genre, particularly a quirky Donnie Darko, that allow you to enjoy its oddities and should keep you awake to the end.

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