TIFF 2025: Joel Edgerton Delivers A Masterclass In ‘Train Dreams,’ A Personal Period Drama That Reckons With America’s Past

A mournful period piece that, on occasion, carries great dramatic weight, director Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams follows a logger in the early 20^th century, and the tragedies that befall him. The movie frames its wistfulness with a keen awareness of the follies of America’s past, making for a sometimes awkward, but mostly thoughtful retrospective on a nomadic way of life at the dawn of urbanization in the Pacific Northwest.

Led by a wonderfully considered performance from Joel Edgerton, who wears his character’s pain (and the scars of time) on his withheld expression, the vivid melodrama comes to Netflix this November, and is poised to be an award-season frontrunner. Its broad emotional strokes are framed by Will Patton’s kindly voiceover, as an omniscient narrator whose wise observations give the whole thing a storybook feel. The film was co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, who also collaborated on the latter’s realistic prison drama Sing Sing, but Train Dreams is a far more poetic and occasionally abstract piece, with a folkloric quality in the vein of a revisionist western about Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed.

Traveling seasonally from his woodland cabin to work on railroads in Washington State, Robert Grainier (Edgerton) soon meets and falls in love with a sprightly woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones), with whom he starts a family. Alternating between cutting trees and raising their infant daughter Kate, Robert’s life is split between two distinct worlds, but bound together by his conscientious hard work. This “bootstraps” work ethic speaks to a facet of the American spirit wherein labor reaps rewards, and brings people a step closer to the American dream (in this case, the perfect homestead on which to grow old with his wife). However, this nostalgia for a lost way of life is also punctured by harsh truths about who has historically suffered in order for America to be built — in the form of one of Robert’s many Chinese coworkers (played by Alfred Hsing), whose cruel death on the job haunts his waking moments. Granted, in the process of turning Hsing’s nameless character into a specter of racism, who quietly follows and curses Robert for several years, Hsing’s ghostly presence is, inadvertently, that of a silent, inhuman symbol, whose only existence is through the eyes of a white protagonist. This reductive effect is likely unintentional, and perhaps even unavoidable, in a story where each aesthetic decision verges on magical realism. 

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

When tragedy finally strikes Robert’s personal life, he’s sent spiraling downward, and loses all sense of purpose. It’s here, in the movie’s second half, that its drama becomes more rigorous, not only centering Robert’s inescapable grief in its gloomy images, but layering it into his every word and interaction. Edgerton, in the process, puts on a masterclass of quiet performance, capturing a wandering hopelessness amidst a pristine, wide-open landscape, calling into question the very ideas of the homeland he once held dear. The film is as much about finding purpose as it is trying to keep on living once you’ve lost it, a sensation that — despite the movie’s period setting — feels all too relevant in the context of a modern, authoritarian United States, a country slowly shedding its ideals.

Adapted from a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson — itself based on an earlier, 2002 version of Johnson’s story — the film’s retrospective structure, of gazing back in time from some nebulous present, is practically built into its nature as an adaptation. That Patton also provided the voice for the novella’s audiobook is a nice touch as well, but these specifics are especially fitting for a story that all but collapses centuries of America’s past into a focused saga across a handful of decades. It resembles tales of early pioneers, of westward expansion, and of Chinese migration and exclusion from decades prior. An older, wiser logger, Arn (William H. Macy), has a brief but impactful presence through his tales of where the workers’ tents and equipment have been citing even older stories passed down to him from the age of the Civil War. The film’s setting may be confined to the first half of the 20^th century, but it frequently opens its arms, embracing both past and future.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

Bentley’s filmmaking resembles a more pop-forward version of Terrence Malick, wherein disembodied shots of nature and frolic become a guiding principle. Despite its esoteric visual form, Train Dreams is squarely a four-quadrant drama, whose most sorrowful moments are easy to explain and understand (though this broad appeal by no means lessens their impact). It becomes, in its latter half, a film of transience, with characters who come and go, and spaces that feel liminal and temporary — including the tracks that Robert builds, which become obsolete in his later years once the highways arrive.

Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso’s roving camera imbues Train Dreams with a spiritual, floating quality. While this may lead to long sections where it feels like the film is searching for something it can’t quite find, this pursuit ends up meaningful in retrospect. For every mildly frustrating question about what Robert’s story is even about comes an eventual, succinct answer that puts into perspective why finding (or realizing) meaning can be such a lengthy and arduous task. Perhaps this self-referential structure runs the risk of losing viewers along the way, but its moving conclusions are worth the wait.

Train Dreams will arrive on Netflix in November of 2025.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.