This charming if decidedly silly sci-fi love story unfolds in a near future where clothes and home furnishings look much like the stuff we have today – while some of the tech equipment the props department came up with looks like the prizewinners at a primary school art fair. For example, there’s a headset people can put on as they go to bed, a mass of wires and twinkly fairy lights, which stops invasive advertising (designed to implant the desire for fried chicken or soft drinks) getting into the sleeper’s dreams. Another looks like a cardboard box with dials painted on it.
Writer-director team Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s low-budget whimsy aesthetic, propelled by a gently satirical undercurrent, is of a piece with other independent film-makers on the smaller film festival beat such as Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, whose quirky suburban fantasia Greener Grass had a release in the UK in 2019. The whole genre is a very refreshing change from slick, hyperrealistic CGI-led films, especially when, as Audley and Birney do here, film-makers use old-school animation techniques and 100-year-old camera tricks to create their dream worlds.
