‘Strawberry Mansion’ is a Darkly Twisted Celebration of Imagination [Review]
Drew Tinnin
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No outside force, individual or corporate, should have dominion over your imagination. The wondrous, frightening, fanciful stuff of our dreams belongs to us and us alone. That being established, if a company could advertise inside a dream and a government could monitor those dreams, would they cross that sacred line if given the chance? In Strawberry Mansion, indie filmmakers Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have created a world where dreams can be infiltrated and invaded, all for the sake of the almighty dollar.
Set in a makeshift future in the year 2035, James Preble (Audley) is a new kind of government agent sent to investigate an eccentric elderly woman named Bella (Penny Fuller) who’s been living (and dreaming) off the grid. Preble is a dream auditor tasked with reviewing over 2,000 VHS tapes containing Bella’s untouched dreams dating all the way back to the year 1985. As Preble begins his journey, he begins to fall in love with a much younger Bella (Grace Glowicki) inside the dream realm.
Bella welcomes Preble into her home but not before he takes a lick of an ice cream cone she offers him in the film’s opening moments. Preble takes a lick in slow motion as the wispy title card appears over top in one of Strawberry Mansion‘s most indelible images. Highlighting the ice cream cone reveals two things: Preble and the audience are entering into a world of psychedelia and what lies ahead will be an entirely sensory experience.
Early on, it’s clear that reality and the dream world start to collide: a talking fly in a spider’s web warns Preble that he’s in danger, a flower pedal from a dream floats into his teacup, and Bella’s home begins to distort with some sort of mysterious interference. Preble realizes that his own reoccurring dream has been manipulated with advertisements by a company called Cap ‘N’ Kelly fried chicken that his manic friend (Linas Phillips) keeps showing up to dinner with. The bucket of chicken even starts to pop up inside of Bella’s dreams as he continues his audit.
A subliminal message starts to emerge through the trippy visuals and inventive, oddball quirkiness inside Audley and Birney’s designed dreamscape. Corporations are transmitting ads into people’s dreams for profit as a means of control. Something transmitted into your dream against your will is a frightening prospect, which is exactly what Preble is doing by auditing Bella’s dreams. Now, it appears that his reality is being audited as well. Fortunately, Bella blocks the ads by wearing a headpiece reminiscent of Doc Brown’s brain wave analyzer in Back to the Future.
The anti-corporate message baked into Strawberry Mansion never undermines the sheer inventiveness of the dream sequences, it only punctuates it. An emphasis on handmade costumes and analog devices ground the fantastical elements adding a DIY level of charm inside of a CGI world. Set in a place out of time, Audley and Birney deliver a locale that serves as a playground for the imagination. In a celebratory act of rebellion, Strawberry Mansion houses a safe space for weirdo indie filmmakers who just want to give the finger to corporate America and big-budget Hollywood.
Strawberry Mansion is now in theaters and hits VOD Friday, February 25th.
