The subtle art of misdirection is integral to the horror genre. It’s exceedingly tough to wrest fear out of what is already familiar, so horror filmmakers tend to design environments of unfamiliarity and confusion to spook and shock their audiences. If you don’t know what’s coming, it’s not just its sudden arrival that’ll frighten you — the dreaded jump scare — but its nervous, tremulous anticipation. Anthony Scott Burns shows himself to be a master of misdirection in Come True, his tense, twisty new horror movie, but when it eventually follows one direction through to a definitive end, you may feel less like you’ve been playfully misdirected, more like you’ve been brazenly hoodwinked.
It all starts extremely promisingly. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), a teenage runaway struggling to maintain a normal life while sleeping rough in her quiet hometown, signs up for an experimental sleep study. It’s a place for her to spend her nights in relative comfort and safety but what’s troubling Sarah more than where she sleeps is what happens when she sleeps. She’s plagued by deeply disturbing recurring nightmares, something that the sleep study may not only exacerbate but may even wish to exploit.
Nightmares made real isn’t exactly a new concept for horror filmmaking — artists have used the uniquely oneiric qualities of cinema to make manifest people’s darkest dreams since that medium’s inception. But, as dedicated as he is to crafting something genuinely innovative out of the tools and tropes of the horror genre, Burns isn’t exactly committed to following this conceptual thread through to its end. Come True is an amorphous movie, establishing itself as one thing then seemingly abandoning that thread to pursue another, then another, then another. It has the feel of a movie stuck in a perpetual loop of development, circling back through the motions of first and second acts without ever wrapping anything up. Right up to its final shot, it’s exploring new ideas, introducing new elements to its increasingly convoluted narrative. It’s odd, even frustratingly odd, yet Burns’ method of leaving the viewer in suspense for as long as he can does afford him ample opportunity to deliver on his movie’s central promise: scaring the shit out of us.
When he does choose to wrap things up (no spoilers here; alas, the only true spoiler in Come True would ruin it entirely), suffice it to say that Burns has a twist in store that’s up there among the most audacious in cinema history. Its audacity is so extreme, it almost makes the movie a masterpiece. There’s no doubt that it isn’t just some lazy it-was-all-a-dream-style fudge — no, it makes perfect sense, not just tying off all the loose ends but revealing how Burns and storywriter Daniel Weissenberger arrived at any and all the ideas they’ve combed through up to that point. But it’s also something of a cheat. A great twist isn’t just dramaturgically sound, it ought to reconfigure what we’ve already seen and learned in a new light that’s equally effective to the material as we first saw it. Famous movie twists, like that of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, work so well because they render their narratives completely differently upon their absolutely essential repeat viewing, not just because they make sense. In this regard, Come True is a complete failure. Not only is there very little point to revisiting it to rummage through all the clues we missed on first watch (since there aren’t any), you’re also likely to feel so offended by the filmmakers’ gall as to have no desire to watch it ever again.
That’s only so disappointing because, up until its ruinous final reveal, this is a very finely made movie. Its nocturnal visuals, pools of shimmering light amid bottomless blacks, vivid neon streaks of blue accenting sterile interiors like a 1980s R-rated thriller, are seductive and beguiling. Its nightmare sequences are profoundly unsettling, filled with deranged imagery that wouldn’t be out of place in a Silent Hill videogame. Its real-life sequences, with dreamt and imagined horrors bleeding out into reality, are arguably even scarier still. The performances, particularly from an extremely expressive Stone and from a game Landon Liboiron as a skeevy scientist working on the study, are excellent. A superb, stylish horror movie is in the process of being built in Come True, right up until the filmmakers drop their bombshell and inform the audience that they were never really intending to make the superb, stylish horror movie we thought they’d been building. Theirs is not the subtle art of misdirection. Theirs is the blunt, brutish art of outright deception.
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