Strawberry Mansion, from directing duo Albert Binney and Kentucker Audley, takes place in a world where dreams are monitored with technology, and both the government and commercial interests can access them. The set-up is similar to Inception and Paprika, but the movie forgoes Inception's mainstream-friendly organization and even Paprika's action-centric approach in favor of pure dream logic and surrealism.
The first half of Strawberry Mansion is relatively grounded in a semi-dystopian reality. James Preble, a "dream auditor," has the job of taxing objects in people's dreams. It's easy to imagine a more libertarian version of this movie where he's a symbol of government overreach, but in this scenario, he's the Dale Cooper-esque "good guy." What the "bad guys" do with dreams is a spoiler, so let's just say that their evil scheme is as darkly funny here as it was when Futurama did the same thing.
Preble has a challenging assignment to audit the dreams of the elderly artist Bella, who lives in the film's titular mansion and has essentially been off the grid. People are supposed to upload their dreams to the cloud; Bella puts hers on VHS. Preble gets to know Bella in both her dreams and her reality, though as in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, dream-like elements often bleed into the "real world" scenes.
Strawberry Mansion is an extremely cool-looking film. It was actually shot on digital, then transferred to 16mm film and back again to digital, giving it a soft, grainy, almost handmade style. The candy colors are soothing except when they're fittingly scary. Retro-futuristic design, wacky costumes, stop-motion animation and a combination of practical and digital effects combine to make the dreams never anything less than visually stunning.
Dan Deacon's electronic musical score is a perfect fit for the movie, complementing the dream-like rhythm with its repetition while appropriately shifting gears when needed to heighten or underscore shifts in emotion. In truth, it might be too perfect at capturing that dream mood. Strawberry Mansion is too weird and continually inventive to ever get boring, but it nonetheless can feel kind of sleepy at times. It's a movie you need to approach with the right state of mind.
It gets harder to love Strawberry Mansion in its second half, which falls almost entirely into a dream world and mostly loses sight of the satirical elements that made its early worldbuilding so fascinating. Some character threads develop interestingly while others are frustratingly dropped. However, even when Strawberry Mansion is incomprehensible, it forms abstract connections in a way that beautifully replicates dream logic. Fans of mindbending cinema will want to take this trip.
Strawberry Mansion is streaming through April 18 at the Seattle International Film Festival. Directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley, it stars Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas Phillips and Constance Shulman.