Border politics suffuse an exploitative romance in Dreams

This familiar two-worlds dynamic is thankfully colored by evocative details. Hernández, who’s actually a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre and an understated performer here, is a good decade younger than Chastain, which physically bolsters their desperate sexual chemistry. After Fernando crosses over from Mexico City all the way to San Antonio in a sweltering semi trailer, hitchhikes to San Francisco, and finds his way into Jennifer’s bougie home, his travails are rewarded with more of the same: a quick lay, a little cash, an empty promise. Dreams defines this crumbling one-sided relationship quickly, getting to the juicier and less-familiar question of what comes next.

And what comes next—Fernando’s search for self-respect in an unfriendly country and Jennifer’s dogged pursuit of her most pleasurable piece of property—is dominated by increasingly villainous entitlement. Each step of the brisk narrative, told through mostly static compositions and detail-skirting story gaps, puts more and more focus on the inequality fueling an explicitly dehumanizing fantasy. Jennifer’s wealth, whiteness, citizenship, and class turn an objectifying fling into something positively colonial. Her affair doesn’t have real human effects because, to her, Mexico isn’t a real place with real people living in it. It’s a fuck that’s inherently meaningless to one party because she can’t fathom contemplating her partner as an equal.

This is all clear enough without meeting Jennifer’s racist brother (Rupert Friend) or off-handedly disapproving father (Marshall Bell); she doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, and Chastain slaps Fernando’s hand away in public like it was a mosquito. But Dreams beats this drum relentlessly, even when the film separates its central pair. A mid-film ballet featuring a shirtless Latino man lifting and leaping with a well-dressed red-haired woman, observed by Jennifer in a box and Fernando deep in the orchestra, is representative of the all-consuming nature of their relationship in this world: Everything in it reflects their connection. It’s even in how similarly, and clinically, cinematographer Yves Cape films dance and sex. Stoic long shots sap the energy and passion from ostensibly horny dirty talk and stairwell rendezvous, just as they drain the elegance from the choreography. The effect is that the film assumes Jennifer’s perspective: Fernando is a machine that performs, who dances and thrusts upon request.

When Dreams finally confronts this view, violently rebutting it with a near-reactionary pushed-too-far anger, it elicits questions to which it doesn’t have the answer. The abusive push-pull between America and Mexico, the conflict between the exotic fantasy of a Latin lover and its xenophobic underbelly, crashes into two people too ill-defined to function as anything more than symbols. And when a filmmaker sees his characters that way, it leads to off-putting maneuvers like Franco’s finale, where recognizable political conflict is made distastefully personal.

Director: Michel Franco
Writer: Michel Franco
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell, Eligio Meléndez, Mercedes Hernández
Release Date: February 27, 2026