Michel Franco’s “Dreams” (2025) is not a love story, though it begins as one. It is not a tragedy either, though it moves inexorably toward collapse. Instead, it is an excavation of the illusions we create about class, gender, and control. A tale where desire collides unapologetically with social reality. In his talk at Berlinale, Franco talks about his love for Bresson’s “Notes On The Cinematographer.” By taking a page from there, the film unfolds deceptively simple in its linearity but devastating in its implications. Every scene is a quiet reckoning, and every gesture a negotiation of power.
From the very first scene, Franco establishes his thematic terrain with an almost mythic clarity: an isolated trailer, its interior filled with unseen voices, restless and pleading. Then, Fernando (Isaac Hernández) emerges—silent, deliberate, walking through an unnamed town towards a restaurant. Dehydrated, he drinks from a leftover jug before being thrown out. The moment lingers, its significance heavy yet undefined. But it gives the audience enough to come up with their own versions. How to define a ‘Mexican immigrant’ crossing illegally. What is he in search of? Sustenance, direction, possibility? And yet, this small act of survival is met with routine rejection. The social order is intact, and it does not shift easily. The kindness of an employee who offers him a ride is an anomaly, not the norm.
And so begins Fernando’s journey to San Francisco, a pilgrimage toward reinvention. He is no blank slate; he carries the weight of his past, of migration’s invisible toll. But Franco constructs his film in a way that forces the audience to project onto him, much as the world does. He is the idealized other, the hard-working, passionate, free-spirited immigrant. Until he isn’t.
When he reunites with Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), an affluent patron of the arts, their chemistry is immediate and electric. At first glance, it appears to be a romance of mutual yearning: a woman seeking escape from the sterile constraints of privilege, a man seeking stability in a world that refuses him permanence. But this is not a story of equals. The film makes that clear, even as it allows the illusion to linger.
Jennifer’s world is cold, not just aesthetically—her glass-walled home, her family’s detached philanthropy—but emotionally. Her father and brother embody American wealth in its purest, most unselfconscious form: they do not see Fernando, not really. To them, he is an abstraction, an inconvenience. Jennifer, in contrast, sees him, but only through the lens of her own longing. She wants to save him, to nurture him, to offer him a life he cannot easily claim for himself. But this is not selflessness—it is control masked as care, a transaction disguised as love. She has the power to provide everything he needs—money, a home, career opportunities—yet the imbalance is never spoken, only felt.
This dynamic, one would read is overtly predatory. But here, the audience hesitates. After all, Jennifer is a woman in a world that does not grant her full agency even within her own family. She seeks freedom, too. And yet, that freedom is bought with money and access, while Fernando’s is bartered with dependence and compliance. Their relationship is not love but a battleground where gender and class intersect, where care is indistinguishable from control.
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Still, they hold onto their fantasy. Jennifer tells herself that Fernando is different, a man untainted by the cynicism of wealth. Fernando tells himself that their love can transcend the structures that keep them apart. But dreams, as Franco’s title suggests, are fragile things. And when they break, they do so violently.
The film’s turning point is brutal and unflinching. A single act, Fernando’s assault on Jennifer, destroys any possibility of reconciliation, leaving the audience disoriented. Franco plays with archetypes throughout the film, inviting the audience to project, assume, and sympathize. Now, he forces them to confront the limits of that sympathy. The audience’s allegiance fractures. And that is precisely Franco’s intent. But only because of that, we are bound to confront the real dynamic between them. It forces us to look back at their relationship. It makes one weigh each of their humanity and compare. There are no easy answers and the film doesn’t even try to answer any. What’s left is for the audience to deal with their own expectations.
This moment, harrowing as it is, is not about one man’s moral failing but about the way class and gender dictate the rules of consequence. Jennifer, despite her evident trauma, retains her power. It is she who calls the police. It is she who ensures Fernando’s deportation. The American dream, so often mythologized as an ascent, is here revealed as a closed circuit. No matter how fiercely Fernando fights, no matter how much Jennifer believes in love’s redemptive power, the borders remain intact.
The film’s ending is a return, a looping back to where it began. Fernando is once again in transit, his journey disrupted, his future uncertain. The film does not offer easy moral judgments. It does not villainize Jennifer, nor does it absolve Fernando. Instead, it presents their relationship as a symptom of a larger structure, one that ensures the powerful remain powerful and the displaced remain displaced.
“Dreams” is not a story of hope, nor of despair, but of confrontation. It forces its audience to sit with discomfort, to recognize the unseen forces that shape human relationships. It is a film that, like its title, seduces with possibility before revealing the hard edge of reality. And in doing so, it reminds us that some barriers—of class, of gender, of privilege—are not so easily overcome, no matter how much we wish to believe otherwise.
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