What Dreams May Come (1998)

I remember I was on youtube once and a video maker I really like and respect had made a short clip to this, with the background track of Iris by the Googoo Dolls. After that video I knew I had to see this film.

Chris (Robin Williams) and Annie (Annabella Sciorra) meet by accident in Italy, and fall in love. They get married and have a family and are truly happy. But now, four years after the death of their children in a tragic car accident, they rebuild their lives. One night, when Chris is delivering some paintings to Annie’s gallery, he witnesses a car accident and stops to help. Because of the pile-up of cars this accident caused, Chris doesn’t see another car as it comes towards him, and he dies. When he wakes up, he is in a beautiful, colorful world that looks just like the painting his wife was making him, with a younger version of the man he first interned for as his guide. Chris is told that he’s in heaven, and that his children are around if he were only to look for them. But he can’t forget Annie. While this is happening in heaven, Annie is on Earth, alone and in pain. After a few months she decides that she can’t cope any more and takes her own life. When Chris hears of this, he says he will go to the ends of the earth, through heaven and hell, to get her back to him. But no one’s ever brought anyone back from hell…

This film is actually not as depressing as it sounds. The world that Chris creates for himself is magical and beautiful, made of real paint and depicting images from his life with Annie and memories of love and devotion between them. When he meets his children, he meets them in their worlds, looking like people they had once seen or knew their parents admired. And hell is not fire and brimstone and demons with pitchforks. Hell is, to quote a character in the film, “your life gone wrong”; everyone’s hell is different. And they can’t get out of there because they believe so blindly that they deserve to be there.

What Dreams May Come is a beautiful timeless love story. It’s about soulmates and the power of love keeping people together. Robin Williams is, as always, unbelievable. He’s one of the few comedic actors who can portray tragedy so well without overdoing it. As his character struggles to come to terms with his death, as he rejoices at having found his children, as he realizes that he really would risk an eternity in hell on one chance to bring the love of his life with him to heaven… he changes and the audience change with him.

The effects of the film are incredible as well. I remember I went to see The Lovely Bones in cinemas not long after I discovered this amazing film, and thinking “wow, this is 2010, the effects are great, and yet I still found What Dreams May Come so much more powerful and beautiful than this…”. I don’t deny that this could be because I saw this film first, or because I liked the storyline better, but it is undeniable that the special effects in this film are glorious. When Chris first arrives in his heaven, he is in a painting. And he’s in a painting literally: the entire set it made of paint, he slips on it, gets stuck in it, covered in it, until he learns to accept that this is his reality, and changes everything to look normal. Hell is shown as people suffering. So it is filled with gray-blue sad people washing up on the shores of a dark beach, or a floor covered in a million faces, all wondering why they can’t get out. The actual hell that Chris finds Annie in is inside an upside down cathedral.

What Dreams May Come is on my top ten. And it landed there after one time watching it. It’s an incredibly powerful film and a very uplifting one. It makes you believe in love and redemption, even though it is based in and set in such a depressing and desolate environment. The characters are believable, the circumstances (albeit unreal) are not unrealistic, and the power of the film is truly felt for many days after you watch it. I give this an 8/10 and would recommend it to anyone who loves a beautiful story, amazing cinematography and true love.

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