Come True movie review & film summary (2021)

“So, we just show up and sleep?,” the young woman asks in disbelief at her first meeting with the scientists in charge of the mysterious experiment. And you can’t exactly blame her for her skepticism. The idea of peacefully drifting away in a comfortable bed is not a known experience to Sarah, who seems to be running away from an unnamed abusive situation at home, spending most of her nights either sleeping at a nearby playground or crashing with her best friend Zoe (Tedra Rogers). Indeed, despite being hooked up to several wires, wearing a thick felt helmet, and sporting various panels tightly wrapped around her body, Sarah wakes up in the morning of her first sleep study night, feeling and looking fresh as anything—maybe she could now stay awake during class, and not drown herself in half a dozen cups of coffee a day.

Predictably, things aren’t as simple as they look in the secretive and groundbreaking (or, so they say) study, aimed at uncovering the truth behind the unexplained condition of sleep paralysis, as revealed later on. First, there's the question of the only other female in the program, who doesn’t show up beyond her first night. The researchers try to assure Sarah that people drop out all the time, but she nonetheless feels uneasy. Then there's the issue of the charming Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), who continues to stalk Sarah—it’s an alarming shocker to her (though not to us) when it’s disclosed that he’s involved behind the scenes of the study. Equally disturbingly, there's the episode of a panic attack that Sarah has when she is shown a familiar image captured from one of her nightmares—just a shadowy figure with indistinct eyes.

The concept of these fearsome pitch-black figures lurking towards you while you sleep, approaching you as you crack your eyes open in tongue-tied dread, will be intensely familiar to those who had the misfortunate of experiencing sleep paralysis before, as well as those who have seen Rodney Ascher’s mischievously spine-tingling docu-horror, “The Nightmare.” He's not as effective in his scares as Ascher, but Burns still gives these hellish visions a frightening edge, enveloping them in the depths of Sarah’s abstract subconscious with ample visual punch. Her dreams crawl through dark tunnels and eerily opening doors, catch glimpses of sculpted limbs and stony bodies hanging from the ceiling, with the images of the sometimes still, sometimes creepily in-motion shadows perennially present. These are genuinely the most effective scenes of “Come True,” with aggressive but memorable production design elements working overtime to disguise the film’s low budget and rough yet commendable VFX. The film’s icy cinematography and synth-centric score—Burns shot, edited, wrote and co-scored the film, the latter under the pseudonym, Pilotpriest—also feel a tad heavy-handed. Still, they collectively help him approach his Cronenbergian levels of paranoia-infused terror, even though he doesn’t quite get there.

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