Like so many other films that have failed to live up to their potential, Come True is a horror movie tinged with sci-fi that has a good idea at the heart of it. That good idea just becomes harder to stay focused on as it becomes buried by more and more unsatisfying moments.
Julia Sarah Stone plays Sarah, a young woman who looks to be having a difficult time in her life. She is also having strange dreams, dreams involving watchful figures that visit while she sleeps. Deciding to participate in a sleep study experiment, Sarah soon suspects that those around her, while she is awake as well as asleep, have a plan that she is vital, but not privy, to.
Written and directed by Anthony Scott Burns, with a foundation laid by Daniel Weissenberger, this is a movie that suffers from an identity crisis. It starts off being strange and rooted in a feeling of familiar horror, takes a turn into standard thriller with some futuristic tech being used to take everything in a direction that becomes increasingly difficult to find at all plausible. Although things do lead up to a decent ending, there's not enough throughout the film to keep viewers invested, which means the final scenes feel like too little too late.
As for the cast, Stone is okay, but she's unable to make her character any more layered than the script makes her. Viewers get the sense that there is much more to learn about her, but we end up being given nothing more than hints and fleeting glimpses of potentially interesting aspects of her life. Landon Liboiron is Jeremy, AKA Riff, and he somehow feels paradoxically completely redundant while also being the one to deliver most of the exposition. Carlee Ryski is given even less to do, as Anita, but she isn't bad in her role. There are others populating the screen as the plot unfolds, but Burns stays focused on the lead character, whether she is accompanied by someone else or diving into her own mental landscape (literally, or in the form of dream recordings).
The main thing worth praising here is the music, also by Burns (as Pilotpriest) and Electric Youth. A couple of main scenes feel completely unnecessary and indulgent, but the music accompanying them is so good that I almost welcomed the brief respite from a plot that I had stopped caring about within the first quarter of the movie.
I am sure there are people who will enjoy the slow burn of Come True, and they may find it easier to overlook the obvious shortcomings that seem heightened whenever you're watching something that you aren't really enjoying, but it didn't work for me, despite my sense of begrudged admiration for the final scenes.
4/10
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