Michel Franco is a filmmaker that understands that humans are complex, often egotistical creatures. Both their morality and intentionality are questionable at best under difficult circumstances. Franco’s movies have perplexed and intrigued critics, though to call them audience-friendly would be a laugh. As someone who can’t help but dig his nails into unsavory territory, not every work of his is ever going to garner universal appeal. It is often his insistence on pressuring his characters further into their worst instincts and that’s only complimented by the cold, distant way he shoots them. We are watching them from afar, observing them in their most private and intimate moments. Unable to fully get inside their minds but to see them completely as they are. The issue his newest film Dreams faces is that the complicated storyline at the center repeatedly flirts with bold and provocative observations about its central romance but ultimately ends up being a pretty distasteful experience.

Jessica Chastain (Franco’s newest muse, having led his 2023 film Memory) stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a socialite and daughter to a rich mogul (Marshall Bell), who is torn between her career under her father Michael’s arts-supporting foundation, working alongside her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) in San Fransisco, and her obsession and affair with undocumented immigrant Fernando (Isaac Hernández). Jennifer’s side of the business has intwined her with the arts community across the border and has been vocally supportive of migrant issues.

Fernando and Jennifer met in Mexico City through a dance studio and Fernando is a highly-talented and sought-after prodigy. Fernando had arrived in America years ago, being deported while in New York in 2013. After arriving back in America years later after being stowed in a hot shipping container from Mexico with other undocumented individuals, Fernando begins his journey on foot instantly, making the long trek to Jennifer’s doorstep. Jennifer’s prim and proper facade drops the instant she sees him, both alone and safe in privacy. Their passion for one another is steamy and unfiltered, talking filthily and explicitly to each other like they are the only two people on Earth.

While Jennifer can pass off Fernando as just a fellow artist, eventually both a performer with her company and youth dance instructor, their companionship becomes unmistakable to the people around her. She knows it looks inappropriate on her end and feels pressured to keep it hidden from her family all while refusing to admit her shame to Fernando. The societal and class disparity she faces with Fernando at her side is blatant. For someone in her position working for Mexican and immigrant causes, she can barely speak a word of Spanish. A flaw of hers likely to never change.

Once their relationship inevitably begins to fracture, Jennifer cannot simply move on from her lover and goes to great extremes to keep him in her life. This is where the story begins to take an enticing new direction, one that feels almost like an Adrian Lyne thriller waiting to burst out. Jennifer’s selfishness begins to mold her into a more complex and morally-corrupt lead. Her mere presence becoming a looming threat. Yet, that’s as far as Franco is willing to go with her. In the last half hour, Franco takes the story in a borderline detestable direction that sours any thematic buildup. One that can’t make its mind up on who is truly at fault surrounding their relationship or why the hell the audience was made to get invested in the first place.

It’s impossible to delve further without fully giving the story away, but the decision made with both Fernando and Jennifer is downright (and I hate to use this word) offensive, and not in a way that is smart and provocative, instead in a way that feels fully misguided. There is a pointed critique of upper-class politics and behavior being made, but the ending is so sour, it’s just as easy to read the other way around. On top of that, it’s just not a very engaging romance to begin with. Franco’s muted and arms-length way of shooting allows for no emotional intimacy, deliberately unsexy and impossible to decipher where their obsession with one another even comes from. Chastain and Hernández try their best, but have stilted chemistry with one another. By the end, what compelling threads there were in the story are simply discarded just to state an ugly evaluation on opposites-attract couplings.