Strawberry Mansion
In 2035, our dreams are no longer our own–they’re infused with product placement and auditors assess unpaid taxes on our most private reveries. Beleaguered taxman James Preble (Kentucker Audley) arrives at a run-down house in the countryside for a routine audit and encounters Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller), a lifelong dreamer who remains resolutely analog, circumventing the surveillance state with VHS tapes and homemade headgear. As Preble works his way through Bella’s archive of the unconscious, he begins to fall in love with visions of her younger self (Grace Glowicki). But all is not well in dreamland as dangerous family secrets and a rogue’s gallery of blue demons and fried chicken pitchmen threaten to set the lovers’ paradise ablaze. Can Preble and Bella escape from the modern, monetized dreamscape and find refuge in Strawberry Mansion?
“A cult weirdo classic in the making.” Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist
“A film to admire not just for its psychedelic aesthetic delirium, but also for its pure moxie, its gleeful embrace of the very idea of filmmaking itself.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Film International
“Sensational, strange, and sophisticatedly sweet.” Kristy Puchko, RogerEbert.com
“With Dan Deacon’s cosmic synth carrying the strange twists along, Strawberry Mansion works its way through an absurdist romance with palpable depth.” Eric Kohn, IndieWire
“Relies on a wide array of movie techniques and deploys them in conspicuously hands-on ways to create a wild science-fiction world that satirizes grim trends of modern life while tapping into a haunted realm of frustrations and desires.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“CRITIC’S PICK! A soulful sci-fi oddity…” Amy Nicholson, The New York Times
“TOP PICK! The film is gentle and kooky, set in a dystopic future that aesthetically borrows from the ’80s. Demons, Nick Cave-like creatures, VHS tapes, buckets of fried chicken, and fedora hats populate it. It’s a world I felt like would be best experienced communally, in the dark church of the theater.” Jas Keimig, The Stranger