Fantasia 2020, Part XXXI: Come True
One of the crucial differences between the way a storyteller approaches the tale they’re telling and the way the audience experiences that tale is that the storyteller typically knows the ending in advance. If they don’t start with the ending and work to that, they’ve usually still worked out multiple drafts of the story, if only in their head. The audience, on the other hand, at least on their first experience of a story doesn’t get to the end until they’ve gone through the whole of the work leading there. Even if they’ve heard something of the ending, or guess at it, the body of the work is necessarily the main part of the experience. If you just get the ending, you haven’t really gotten the whole story.
This is worth noting because if a story’s ending is weak, or markedly out of tone with the rest of the work, there’s a temptation for a critic to say that the ending let the story down. From an audience perspective, that’s absolutely true. From a storyteller’s perspective, it instead suggests that the rest of the story was misjudged. Something, or multiple somethings, did not work in harmony with the vision of the ending that was always there.
Which brings me to Come True. It’s a science fiction film that played Fantasia, and it was written and directed by Anthony Scott Burns. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) is a teen in a big city who’s falling asleep at inappropriate times. Alienated from her family and spending nights in a park, she stumbles on a sleep study researching dreams, which promises to give her a bed for a month. But odd things happen at the study. Other participants drop out. One of the men running the study (Landon Liboiron) seems to be following her. And her dreams may be getting worse.
On a sensory level, Come True is a powerful movie. Burns also composed the soundtrack and handled the cinematography, and his work in those departments is excellent. The whole movie seems to take place in a twilight of filtered light and odd sounds on the edge of hearing. Nightmares are given a creepy and distinctive visual form, the camera steadily moving through worlds of shadowed shapes.
And the first half of the movie is a sharply-told story about science digging into mysteries that might hold more dangers than the researchers know. The film moves well, passing swiftly through Sarah’s struggles at home and school to spend time at the mysterious study, and in this context that’s a strong choice. This is a movie that knows what’s interesting about its ideas, and those things are not the usual elements of everyday life.
There is a certain tone I find in some works of science fiction, almost all from Europe, a ‘literary’ approach that uses science-fictional imagery with self-conscious irony in a way that at least approaches allegory and often satire. In prose I associate this approach with Lem and indeed Kafka; in film, with Tarkovsky’s science-fiction (adapting Lem and the Strugatskys) and Alphaville and On The Silver Globe. The focus in these works is less on world-building than on symbolism, and often on a narrative structure that layers stories within stories and plays with chronology. At their best, these tales emphasise the purely fantastic essence at the heart of science fiction: a type of wonder that uses a modern vocabulary.
There’s an old line that says science fiction literalises metaphors. It’s a line that applies to fantasy and horror, too. It means that, for example, a realist book may say that somebody walking through their old house is haunted by memories like the ghosts of their past, while a horror story might have that person be actually haunted by an actual ghost representing that past. What is metaphor in one case is literal in the other. But still a metaphor, as well, still symbolising something more than itself. Part of the trick of writing stories of the fantastic is knowing how to handle the metaphorical and the literal — knowing exactly how literal to make the literalised metaphor, and how to explore what literalising the metaphor brings the story, and how to explore the metaphor as metaphor while keeping it a literal thing.
I’ve mentioned that many of the films I saw at this year’s Fantasia were haunted-house stories. Or: horror movies that revolve around a specific architectural location. That’s an intriguing coincidence in the year of COVID-19, but perhaps speaks to filmmakers finding a way to limit budgets and get the most use possible out of their locations. Which brings me to 2011, a film set in a single apartment and a kind of ghost story that begins and ends with the horror-thriller form. But this only becomes clear at the very end, for mainly this is an experimental and ambitious film that wanders through different genres and types of stories. 
