‘Dreams’ Review: Jessica Chastain Leads a Cruel Love Story That Speaks to the Mexico-United States Border Crisis

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In the context of contemporary America, a land literally and figuratively burning as it makes its way through the first months of 2025 alone, what does it even mean to dream anymore? Has this country been built on a mythical vision for dreamers, concretizing self-interest above community, permitting an egocentricity that has allowed us to turn on our neighbors? Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco probes these desperate questions with his latest, the facetiously titled Dreams, starring Jessica Chastain and dancer-turned-actor Isaac Hernández. Totally inconsolable in its views of today's America, Dreams is a steely, fascinating story of cross-cultural lovers doomed from the start. 

The film first introduces Hernández's character, Fernando Rodriguez, a twenty-something ballet dancer, as he desperately trudges across the border from Mexico to El Paso, with San Francisco becoming his ultimate destination. Upon arrival in the Golden City, he heads straight to the home of his lover, Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain), who is approaching middle age and uber-rich thanks to the family business, which allows her to dedicate her time to a handful of non-profit dance programs across San Francisco and Mexico City. Reunited, Fernando and Jennifer spend a few days of bliss in an isolated lovers' nest before things begin to spiral.

Jennifer prefers to keep Fernando to herself, avoiding run-ins with her bougie circle of associates and family members when she is with her beloved, which Fernando becomes increasingly bothered by, with plenty of reason. When they have chance encounters with her cohorts, Jennifer never introduces him as her boyfriend but instead as a dance teacher working for her institution. As Fernando becomes increasingly disillusioned by the facade of their relationship, Jennifer leans in even more, pulling out all the stops as he fades from her life to focus on his own future in the United States: a toxic cycle of authority over Fernando rises to the surface. 

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As with much of his work, Franco once again uses Dreams to explore the constructs of power that hold a death grip on his central characters. While Jennifer initially comes across as a powerful woman with a one-track mind for her own interests, the film's intricate screenplay slowly reveals her true helplessness, with her father and brother holding dominion over her movements and choices. This frustration on her behalf, which remains largely internalized, then bleeds into her treatment of Fernando, albeit in a much more distinctive manner, which Dreams remains most fascinated with. On Fernando's part, as the film moves forward and shifts to a much darker tone, in its final chapter, he too attempts to mimic the control that he suffers beneath, ultimately unable to fully harness such power in the face of the multitudinous institutional and social inequities that work against him, his people, and his culture. The movie's fixation with dance also fits brilliantly into these investigations of authority: control over movement and bodies.

Her second collaboration with Franco after 2023's Memory, Chastain channels a performance one million miles away from her Oscar-winning turn in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. There is a repulsiveness to Jennifer's reluctance to step outside of her own experience and consider that of her lover, an oblivion of privilege as she tracks down Fernando at his odd jobs at motels and dive bars, able to move in and out of these spaces of class without any conscious regard of why, in stark comparison to Fernando's constant fight to be heard and seen. Recently becoming the first Mexican principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre, Dreams marks Hernández's third screen performance. As Fernando, the thirty-four-year-old actor embodies his character's optimism-turned-anguish as he clings to the hopes of finding success in America. This prospect steadily grows farther from his grasp as Dreams hurtles towards its cruel conclusion.

Chastain and Hernández collaborate onscreen with poisonous chemistry, oscillating from steamy sexual encounters (particularly in one brilliantly blocked moment shot on a staircase in Jennifer's starkly modern townhouse) to incredible ruthlessness, devoid of all tenderness, a primary feature of Franco's modus operandi. Anyone who expects this love affair to reach a joyful conclusion will have their anticipations quickly shattered.

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The ill-fated lovers at the heart of Dreams serve as a hypnotic microcosm through which Franco articulates the increasingly distressing migrant crisis in the United States, one of the nation's most concerning inequities as the once-again president continues his tyrannical crackdowns, which moved into overdrive as soon as he stepped back into office. This alone gives Dreams a crucial urgency and connection to the contemporary that should be considered one of the silver screen's most philosophical explorations of the inhumanities perpetrated by the United States at its southern border.

4/5

‘Dreams’ had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, February 15. The film is still seeking a distributor in the United States.