Review of Dreams of a Life (2011) by Betty S — 26 Dec 2011

While the execution was innovative, a discursive narrative with conflicting accounts that underlined the dissonance in remembrances of the deceased, it was hard to tell what the film was really getting at: estrangement, isolation or loneliness. There were contrivances and contradictions in the plot or characterization, and the idea that Joyce's family made no attempt of contacting her for several years is utterly implausible. The film made no effort in convincing an audience that this story was in any way plausible.

Even if the film was exploring estrangement of an individual and the loss of her identity to the narratives of the living present, there really was little solid inquiry into these themes and ideas. Rather, it was a montage of guilt, frustration, misunderstanding, misapprehension and conjecture. It portrays how increasingly estranged we grow amongst our neighbours (and shove unnecessary feel-good messages down our throats in the end), but it doesn't go further than that. In fact, it most to teenagers in a phase when they are fixated on the ideas of death, suicide and the like: when everybody wonders what it would be like if they were dead, never born or just vanished inexplicably. It handles complex issues like death and estrangement with the same degree of maturity as a fifteen-year-old.