On paper, Michel Franco’s Dreams sounds like a searing take on power, privilege, and unbalanced relationships, starring Jessica Chastain as Jennifer, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist hiding her affair with an undocumented Mexican dancer, Fernando (Isaac Hernández). Unfortunately, while the premise holds undeniable promise, the film never fully delivers on its potential. Despite Franco’s austere directing style and a few striking moments of tension, it’s largely undone by a central performance that feels oddly unconvincing, plus several scenes that seem gratuitous rather than illuminating.
From the start, Dreams teases real stakes and danger. One of the film’s best scenes depicts Fernando’s harrowing journey across the border, trapped in the back of a truck with other desperate migrants. The claustrophobic framing and muffled screams create an immediate jolt, hinting at a film willing to confront the grim realities of illegal immigration head-on. Yet almost as soon as Fernando arrives at Jennifer’s Bay Area mansion, Dreams transitions into a cold-blooded love story with sporadic bursts of conflict, an intriguing idea in theory but one that never gels on screen.
Jessica Chastain has built a reputation for diving deep into complicated women, whether power brokers or misunderstood underdogs. Here, she plays Jennifer as someone accustomed to having her way and shrewd enough to maneuver around any messy consequences. But the moral conflict is supposed to stem from her guilt and hypocrisy; she bankrolls noble arts programs while concealing this questionable relationship. That should make for compelling drama. Instead, Chastain’s performance feels oddly stiff, as if she’s never truly inhabiting the character. The usual nuance and fire that Chastain brings to her roles are missing; her Jennifer seems to be operating in a vacuum, going through the motions rather than grappling with any real moral dilemma.
The script certainly gives her moments that should register as complex and contradictory: private jets, hush-money solutions, and power games that teeter between romance and exploitation. Yet none of it resonates. When Jennifer wrestles with whether to expose her relationship to her wealthy family, there’s a persistent sense of artifice. Her interactions with her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend) could have been explosive, but they fizzle, mostly because it’s hard to buy Jennifer’s internal struggle in the first place. As a result, scenes that might have been thought-provoking instead feel forced.
Isaac Hernández, meanwhile, brings genuine presence to Fernando. A celebrated ballet dancer in real life, Hernández imbues the role with physical grace and earnest vulnerability. His quieter approach works for a character forced to live in the shadows, even after he lands a shot at the prestigious San Francisco Ballet. Still, even his believable intensity can’t fully salvage the film’s disjointed structure.
Worse yet, Dreams is peppered with certain sequences, explicit sex scenes and repetitively cruel encounters, that feel unnecessarily long or lurid. They don’t add insight into the characters or build meaningful tension; they’re just there, slowing down the narrative flow. Franco’s minimalist style can be compelling when he zeroes in on raw human drama, as in his earlier films, but here he allows the pacing to lag in moments where momentum would have served the story.
By the final act, Dreams aims for a shocking resolution, ratcheting up the toxicity of this ill-fated affair. There are flashes of genuine discomfort and moral questioning, brief reminders of the film this could have been. Yet the ending feels at once abrupt and too familiar, like a dutiful box being checked rather than an earned conclusion.
In the end, Dreams might linger in the mind for its themes immigration, privilege, exploitation but it never quite earns the weight it seems to crave. A solid concept goes unrealized, undone by the miscasting (or at least a misfire) of Jessica Chastain, who never once convinces as the ruthless yet self-deluding philanthropist. Add in a handful of scenes that verge on gratuitous and you’ve got a movie that just can’t sustain its ambitions. It’s frustrating, because the narrative’s raw ingredients were primed for a deep, resonant exploration of power and desire; instead, Dreams settles for a stylish but hollow outline of what might have been.