Delayed Reaction: Strawberry Mansion

Premise: A dream auditor in a not-too-distant future discovers a corporate plot to influence people's dreams.

 

Part of the fun of real indie movies is seeing how filmmakers negotiate big ideas with limited budgets. Some just shoot for smaller ideas. Others spend a lot of time meandering with the hope that one showstopping sequence will forgive the scrimping elsewhere. Then there are those that just build the frugality into the film. I don't imagine Strawberry Mansion cost much at all to make. It has a couple actors I recognize, but no Names. The number of shooting locations is pretty limited. But it doesn't feel like the filmmakers (Kentucker Audley, Albert Birney) held much back when making this. Instead, they just let everything look cheap. Honestly, that kind of worked.

 

You see, Audley plays a dream auditor named James. It's the year 2035, and somehow we've developed technology to record and examine dreams. The items in the dream are somehow assigned a dollar value that people must pay. James goes to an older woman's house to make sure the amount she owes is correct. In the process he bonds with the woman who reveals that companies have been secretly putting advertisements in dreams without letting people know. Oh, and he somehow falls in love with the old woman's younger self. It's a big idea: one that I could easily see as some $100 million Chris Nolan movie. Except, in this, they pull off most of the technology and dreams by building everything out of cardboard. Not literally, but "cardboard" is the aesthetic. It ends up working, because my mind automatically says "ok, now just imagine everything in this scene looks better".

 

I hate to say it, but I still had trouble getting over the lack of polish in the movie. While I appreciated how much they did with so little, it did feel like a weekend project. The acting wasn't great, often because the actors were delivering self-awarely odd dialogue. The world of the movie didn't feel consistent to me. I don't feel like the world existed beyond the frame of the camera, and the logic of the dream auditing only felt as thought out as the story required. I don't need everything about the auditing explained to me, but I like when I get the impression that the filmmaker has thought it all out. I didn't get that with this movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend