COME TRUE: Releases Digitally Across Canada March 12th

High school student Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) isn’t an attentive student. Her nights bounce between scared sleeplessness and surrealistic nightmares, leaving her nodding off in class.

 

But the worst is yet to come when she signs on as a paid volunteer for a sleep study, one in which new technology allows researchers to look closely at Sarah’s dreams - and just maybe allows the dreams to look back.

 

In Come True, written and directed by Anthony Scott Burns, lines of reality are blurred. Nightmares can be straight-out hellish, with bodies hanging in air, beings crawling out of black pools, and a singularly haunting glowing-eyed, dark entity called, The Persona. Or they can be mundane apparent reality suddenly re-written by the mind to take sinister turns.

 

Sarah’s ally in the search for what’s real is Jeremy, a.k.a. “Riff” (Landon Liboiron). Riff is a young researcher who’s beginning to chafe at the cruel direction of Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington), sympathizes with his patients (particularly Sarah), and worst of all, has begun to experience the worst manifestations of her shared nightmares.

 

Loaded with evocative imagery and powered by dream-logic, Come True is executive produced by Canadian horror legend Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice), who believes he discovered a “garage Stanley Kubrick” in Burns. “He’s a filmmaker with vision, capable of creating a high level of cinema on a low budget, having a hand in everything from the writing to the cinematography to the music.”

 

Burns says his inspiration for Come True was a long-time obsession with two very different Disney features – Alice in Wonderland and Tron. “Tron presented a complete world outside our own world, with its own rules, which can be very unsettling. And Alice in Wonderland introduced me to dream logic, the idea that nonsensical things can happen. The difference is, they happen here in a horror context.”

 

And the “nightmare men,” he says, came from asking people about their nightmares and noting that there were indeed shared experiences. “There will be imagery that many viewers may find familiar, and they may not know why.

 

“We wanted to create a dream world that’s beautiful and artistic, but deep down you know you shouldn’t be there.”