Train Dreams (film)

Summarize Fact Check

The film recounts the 80 years of the life of Robert Grainier around Bonners Ferry, Idaho.^[4] Arriving in the area on the Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child,^[when?] Robert drops out of school and spends his younger years without direction or purpose, until he meets Gladys Olding. They marry, build a log cabin along the Moyie River, and have a daughter, Kate.

Robert takes to railroad construction for the Spokane International Railway. There he witnesses a Chinese worker thrown from a bridge by a group of white workers for unclear reasons, which gives him continually haunting visions of the man and dreams of him being struck by a train. Robert later takes up seasonal logging work, but it takes him away from Gladys and Kate for long periods of time.

Robert meets many men who leave impressions on him, but he also witnesses more tragedies along the way. One worker is killed by a vigilante avenging the murder of his brother; several other workers are killed by a falling tree, their graves marked by pairs of boots nailed to trees. Robert grows close to a fellow logger, Arn Peeples, who is severely injured by a falling branch, and then dies a few days later.

Although Robert tries to take up work closer to home, he faces struggles in the post-World War I economy. He and Gladys decide to farm and build a lumber mill so he can stop logging. However, when Robert returns from his final season of logging he discovers the cabin destroyed in a wildfire, with Gladys and Kate missing. Despondent, his friend Ignatius Jack gives him company, then he rebuilds the cabin. As Robert returns to logging, he becomes out of place amid new technology and younger, rougher men, so he decides to stop.

Taking a job as a carriage driver for townspeople, Robert meets Claire Thompson of the United States Forest Service who is in town to conduct a survey, and encourages him. He continually walks through the woods, believing he can feel the spirits of his wife and daughter sometimes, and hopes not to drive them away; Claire in turn tells him how her husband died after a long illness.

One night, Robert believes he sees an injured Kate apparently return to the cabin and he tends to her wounds, then plays with baby Kate by the river. However, after a night of dreams he awakens to find her gone and a window open. He determines to continue living in the cabin in case she ever returns. Years go by, and the world changes around an aging and weathered Robert, who rides the Great Northern into Spokane, witnessing John Glenn's flight into space on a television.

The film ends on a spring day when Robert decides to fly in a biplane. As the plane loops and circles in the air, sights and sounds of people and places throughout his life pass through his mind. The narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in the cabin in November 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

• Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier
• Felicity Jones as Gladys Olding Grainier, Robert's wife
• Kerry Condon as Claire Thompson, a forestry services worker
• William H. Macy as Arn Peeples, an explosives expert
• Will Patton as the narrator^[a]
• Nathaniel Arcand as Ignatius Jack, a storekeeper and Robert's friend
• John Diehl as Billy, an old logger
• Paul Schneider as Apostle Frank, a talkative logger
• Clifton Collins Jr. as Boomer, an injured man whom Robert encountered as a boy
• Alfred Hsing as Fu Sheng, a Chinese logger
• Chuck Tucker as Silent Man
• Rob Price as Curious Logger
• Beau Charles as Young Logger
• Johnny Arnoux as Kootenai Indian
• John Patrick Lowrie as Mr. Sears
• Branden Lindsay as Elijah Brown^[5]

Train Dreams has been compared to the work of Terrence Malick, and Bentley has cited Malick as an influence, describing him as "one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever lived."

He changed the language of cinema. He created a new form, like one of those rare filmmakers that turned the medium in a new direction. There's not many of them.

So, yeah, I'm a big fan. Trying to do my own thing, but if I'm mentioned in the same sentence as him, I'm very honored.^[6]

Bentley has cited Andrei Rublev, Princess Mononoke, It's Such a Beautiful Day, and Days of Heaven as films that influenced his adaptation of Denis Johnson's novella.^[7] Bentley also cited Jules et Jim and Y Tu Mamá También as key influences on the film's use of third-person narration.^[6]

The film was produced by Marissa McMahon and Ashley Schlaifer with Black Bear as an adaptation of Denis Johnson's 2011 novella Train Dreams by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, and directed by Clint Bentley and starring Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton. Producers include Marissa McMahon and Ashley Schlaifer for Kamala Films, and Will Janowitz, and Teddy Schwarzman and Michael Heimler for Black Bear.^[8] In May 2024, Kerry Condon, William H. Macy, and Clifton Collins Jr. joined the cast.^[9]

Principal photography started in Washington in April 2024, with filming locations including Tekoa, Snoqualmie, Spokane, Metaline Falls, and Colville.^[10][11] The production was approved for support from the Production Incentive Program of Washington Filmworks.^[12] Although Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso considered shooting on film, the production's 29-day schedule made it impractical; as a result, it was shot digitally.^[6]

Bentley has said that only a limited number of real trees were felled during production; scenes depicting characters cutting into a tree were performed using an artificial prop constructed from wood and fiberglass, with visual effects applied to extend the trunk and canopy to resemble a full-sized tree.^[6] Will Patton provided the voiceover for the film. He had also previously narrated the audiobook of Denis Johnson's novella.^[13]

In an interview with Variety, Veloso mentions that the movie was shot entirely in natural light using an ARRI Alexa 35 cinema camera.^[14] Additionally, Veloso built a customized candle rig in order to get around the set's no open flames rule.^[15]

Music

Main article: Train Dreams (soundtrack)

An original song recorded for the film and performed by Nick Cave, "Train Dreams", was not included in the version shown at the Sundance Film Festival; it was added in subsequent releases, playing over the end credits.^[16]

Train Dreams premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2025.^[17][18] Shortly after, Netflix acquired distribution rights to the film.^[19] The film was released in select theaters in the United States on November 7, 2025, before being made available for streaming on Netflix globally on November 21.^[20][21]

It competed in Stockholm Competition of the 2025 Stockholm International Film Festival on November 8, 2025.^[22]

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 243 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "A gorgeous meditation on America, ably shouldered by one of Joel Edgerton's very best performances, Train Dreams takes on mythic proportions while maintaining an intimate emotional delicacy."^[23] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 88 out of 100, based on 43 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[24]

Writing for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico gave the film 4 stars out of 4, calling it "a meditation on the beauty of everyone and everything", and commenting that "the reason it's one of the best [films] of the year is how [Bentley] threads the needle between brutal reality and wistful poetry."^[25]