Strawberry Mansion – Movie Review
91 Minutes, Not Rated
Written and Directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley.
Synopsis:
In 2035, our dreams are no longer our own–they’re infused with product placement and auditors assess unpaid taxes on our most private reveries. Beleaguered taxman James Preble (Kentucker Audley) arrives at a run-down house in the countryside for a routine audit and encounters Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller), a lifelong dreamer who remains resolutely analog, circumventing the surveillance state with VHS tapes and homemade headgear.
As Preble works his way through Bella’s archive of the unconscious, he begins to fall in love with visions of her younger self (Grace Glowicki). But all is not well in dreamland as dangerous family secrets and a rogue’s gallery of blue demons and fried chicken pitchmen threaten to set the lovers’ paradise ablaze. Can Preble and Bella escape from the modern, monetized dreamscape and find refuge in Strawberry Mansion?
Wow. What a fever dream this one is…
At once surreal and all-too familiar, Strawberry Mansion is not a film for people who don’t like to be confronted with things that just don’t make sense.
With the concept that the government now taxes things from inside your dreams (like some unused line from The Beatles’ great song, “Taxman:”
If you try to sleep
I’ll tax your dreams….
the film then plays out like a standard time travel(?) love story… although this one is a bit messier if you attempt to apply even a modicum of logic to how these two are actually existing together.
The performances are suitably charming, especially that of Grace Glowicki as our “young Bella,” and it’s an interesting world-concept, with more than enough wackiness to keep a willing viewer entertained.
Just don’t overthink it.
Listen to the episode for more thoughts on Strawberry Mansion, because I didn’t give them all to you here.
Strawberry Mansion played at Sundance in 2021 and will hit select theaters on February 18 and VOD on February 28.
Strawberry Mansion stars Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Linas Phillips, Reed Birney, Constance Shulman, Ephraim Birney.
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