Dreams Review: Love Without Direction

Michel Franco has a clear story he wants to tell with Dreams; unfortunately, the execution ultimately falls short.

From the opening frame, the film feels loose and undisciplined—an unexpected flaw for a story attempting this level of emotional magnitude.

The cinematography never establishes a visual pulse for the film. Rather than shaping moments or deepening the emotional texture of the story, the camera often feels content simply to record whatever moves in front of it. The result is a film that drifts visually, as if the direction itself is still searching for the story’s center.

There are only three moments when the cinematography feels deliberate: Jennifer’s isolation, a quiet scene of Jennifer and Fernando lying together on the couch, and the film’s most intimate encounter between the two. In these scenes, the framing sharpens and the images suddenly feel purposeful. For a brief moment, the film reveals the aesthetic clarity it might have sustained throughout.

The script reveals a similar uncertainty.

Franco appears to be pursuing a tragic love story—one both epic and destructive in its emotional intensity. Yet that vision never fully materializes on the page. The structure struggles to balance its central relationship, leaving the emotional trajectory uneven from the start.

Jennifer and Fernando’s love is introduced as something overwhelming and relentless, yet the audience is asked to accept its intensity almost immediately rather than experience it develop. The relationship fractures just as quickly as it forms, only to be rekindled again without meaningful sacrifice. What should feel operatic instead feels structurally rushed.

There are clear echoes of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! in Franco’s approach, suggesting a similar interest in obsession, erotic fixation, and the psychological instability of love pushed to its limits. But where that film embraces its tonal contradictions, Dreams struggles to reconcile its own.

The dialogue often undermines the film’s central premise. Characters speak of devotion and sacrifice, yet their actions reveal alternative motives. If Franco intended this contradiction to create moral ambiguity, the result instead leaves the characters feeling psychologically erratic rather than emotionally complex.

Both Jennifer and Fernando go to extreme lengths for one another, performing grand gestures of love that quickly collapse into acts of cruelty. The film gestures toward the idea that love inevitably turns destructive, but it never fully commits to exploring that idea with clarity.

Franco attempts to create characters who feel genuine and emotionally volatile, yet in doing so he constructs figures whose moral boundaries seem almost nonexistent. Their behavior often feels dictated more by circumstance than by a clear psychological foundation.

Jennifer’s willingness to accept, forgive, and even justify Fernando’s actions—particularly in the beginning of the third act—reveals how deeply fractured her character truly is. Yet the film provides little narrative substance to support that transformation.

Throughout the film there are hints, comments, and fragments of dialogue referencing the characters’ pasts, offering glimpses of who they were before the events of the story. But these fragments never accumulate into a full understanding of their emotional histories.

In the final act, the film mirrors Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! almost beat for beat, with the notable exception of its conclusion. Yet even as the narrative diverges, the emotional outcome remains strikingly similar: a woman left psychologically shattered.

Ultimately, Dreams falls short in nearly every way except one—its performances.

Jessica Chastain delivers a raw, committed performance, arguably her most emotionally exposed work since Molly’s Game, and one that recalls the intensity she brought to Zero Dark Thirty. Unfortunately, the character’s arc never receives the narrative depth needed to fully support her work.

Isaac Hernández also delivers a career-best performance, holding his own opposite Chastain’s commanding presence. Together, the two actors bring a level of emotional conviction that the film itself struggles to sustain.