Strawberry Mansion review – quirky but endearing dreamscape sci-fi romance
This charming if decidedly silly scifi 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.
Audley himself plays Preble, a tax inspector with a dashing trilby, who arrives at the pink homestead of an elderly bohemian lady named Bella (Penny Fuller). His job is to audit not just her income but the value of objects in her dreams, which he can access using some of the funky aforementioned tech because everyone’s dreams are recorded. Wandering around Bella’s dreamscapes, Preble falls in love with Bella as a younger woman (played by Grace Glowicki) and is intrigued by people he sees in her dreams that look like they’re covered in living grass like walking front lawns, or trailing fringes of videotape. Eventually, tragedy strikes and Preble goes deeper into the dream record for “years” – or just a long stretch of sleep – where he lives happily with young Bella on an island, inventing games with shells and eating vegetables they find in the sand. It’s like Audley and Birney have done a remake of Christopher Nolan’s Inception with only sticky-back plastic and a couple of wobbly green screens for effects.
Beneath the crazy candy-coloured palette, there is actually some real human warmth in the love story, and the acting ensemble features some great comic performers in supporting roles, including Constance Shulman (Yoga Jones in Orange is the New Black) and character actor Linas Phillips (Manson Family Vacation) as a sinister “friend” who infiltrates many people’s dreams.
• Strawberry Mansion is released on 16 September in cinemas and on digital platforms.