VIFF 2025 | 'Train Dreams' Logs the Pacific Northwest Frontier

"That state is a collection of savage lunatics."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Sing Sing co-writer/producer Clint Bentley remembers the natural beauty and wonder of the Pacific Northwest in his American frontier drama, Train Dreams. Set during and after the Great War, we follow the unremarkable but deeply meaningful life of a contemplative Idaho orphan logger (Joel Edgerton) who travels across the Western United States as it slowly becomes developed before settling in a cabin in the woods of Washington State.

Edgerton's rugged hard labour worker is soon joined by Felicity Jones as his supporting wife and loving partner. She represents the good of all that backbreaking work, as Egerton's Robert struggles to deal with seeing ghosts from his past manifesting in a cursed dark cloud of dread consuming his thoughts. Through Robert, Bentley's mournful period drama explores the melancholic beauty and horrors of twentieth-century history upon our reflection today.

Based on author Denis Johnson's award-winning 2011 novella of the same name, Bentley and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar's bare but lyrical script provides a suitable dreamlike quality while making the sudden racial violence against Chinese migrants shockingly casual. There are few characters of note, as small but heartfelt supporting turns from William H. Macy and Kerry Condon make Robert's devastating isolation all the more vividly real.

Framed as an elegantly naturalistc visual poem of faded memories, Bentley constructs Train Dreams as a eulogy for a long bygone era of frontiersmen. Edgerton's stoically fine performance anchors a dramatized ordinary life of discovery, loss, grief, hope, and recovery. It's a staggeringly fateful work of historical fiction echoing the cloud of doom and gloom that's soon to engulf Western society.

Train Dreams screened at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations series at the Granville Island Stage and Rio Theatre. It also screens at the VIFF Centre on 35mm film starting November 7th and will be available to stream on Netflix on November 21st.


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