Train Dreams

This discussion of Train Dreams appeared in the programme for the London Film Critics' Circle Awards 2026, making a case for the film's nomination for Best Picture. 

​A camera glides through a tunnel. A locomotive gathers speed as it crosses a timber bridge, hurtling toward the camera as if to crush the cinematic apparatus—and so the audience—beneath its wheels. Ash, steam, fenders and embers flare between the trees as an apocalyptic iron horse rides through the darkness.
 
These are the evocations of an old world in which phantom-ride films, ghostly fairground thrills, and engines on ever-extending railways networks promised people a brighter, faster future. These are the machines that have shaped our present. But in telling us stories about the technological past, Train Dreams refuses to sell us an inhuman dream of modernity.
 
Robert Grainier cuts trees for a living. Traversing mountains and forests, he travels far from home to find work. He cherishes wife Gladys, and young daughter Kate, and builds an idyllic cabin for them beside a creek. But while her dreams are stereotypically American (get a loan, build a business), his are haunted by demonic trains. He has witnessed a racist murder while briefly employed on the railway, and his complicity in structurally enabling the violence disturbs his peace. Work and domesticity are at odds; in this world, a man can’t have it all.

Nature resources the railway as Robert builds a bridge in Train Dreams, 2025.

​Like so many of the displaced people he encounters—logger Arn, friend Ignatius Jack, forest surveyor Claire—Robert is off-kilter in a world that evades meaning. People carry their knowledges of nature, religion, and logic with them like tools in knapsacks that may, or may not, help them survive. Justice is rare, and certainty rarer still.
 
Yet even as they wander the film grounds people amid grasses, ferns and trees. They are framed on thresholds. They are submerged in water. The camera immerses us in the world as it was before aerial shots transformed how people saw the land. It’s a beautifully textured world that makes the weave of fabric and grain of wood feel as though it might be grazing your fingertips. The beautifully crafted score entices us to follow Robert on his journey, even into the darkest realms.
 
Delivered by a narrator that harks back to the telling of tales around a campfire, the story bears witness to Robert’s pain, to his joys and failures, and his unwitting hand in the ecological devastation that kills his family. The film demands that we, too, bear witness, and in doing so confront the burden of our own complicity in overusing natural materials. When we mourn with Robert, Train Dreams holds space for us to mourn for ourselves, and the future generations affected by fires that we have stoked. For all the script’s subtleties, this is bold storytelling.
 
Through the tale of one quietly lived life, then, so unassuming as to fade from history like lichen-covered boots nailed to a tree, it asks questions about nature, conflict, history, work, wisdom, aging, change – and what it all means. It echoes through the ages to our own socially unjust and often brutal times, in which we cannot hope to make sense of it all. But far from causing us despair, Train Dreams offers us a poignant reminder that there is always hope. For, like the mycelial fronds growing deep between the roots of trees, we and the worlds around us are interconnected.
 
Beautiful, ain’t it?