Hansal mehta

Some films arrive like a whisper. You don’t notice them at first. Then they settle inside you and refuse to move. Train Dreams is one of those films. Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella is quiet and unhurried, almost deceptively simple, but somewhere along the way it opened a small window inside me. It reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place.

Watching it took me back to 1994 when I first saw Kieslowski’s Bleu. I remember leaving the theatre with something rearranged within me. I felt that again here. A gentle shift. A soft turning of some inner wheel.

The film drifts through nearly eighty years of Robert Granier’s life. A man who seems to live inside himself even when he is with the people he loves or the men he works alongside. His solitude is not dramatic. It is simply who he is. A condition of being. The film treats it with a kind of respect. A patience. It allows him the quiet he needs.

What struck me most was the use of voice-over. In so many films it feels like a crutch, like a shortcut for narrative bankruptcy. Here it becomes part of the breath of the film. You don’t hear it as narration. You hear it the way you hear your own thoughts when you are walking alone. Soft, unforced, present but never demanding attention. It blends with the landscape, with the forests and rivers and the changing seasons. The film lets nature speak. And it listens.

Everything that matters : love and grief, cruelty and tenderness, life and its inevitable vanishing – appears visually. The film trusts the viewer to see, to feel, to understand without being told. It is visual poetry held together by the prose of human experience. A balance that is rare.

As a filmmaker, I felt grateful watching it. There is a kind of democracy in its creation. A belief that cinema belongs to those who are willing to imagine and to wait. Those who allow the story to breathe. Those who listen more than they assert. Films like this make the medium feel wide and generous again.

After Adolescence, Netflix has surprised me once more by bringing a film like Train Dreams into our reach. Even if they were not involved creatively, simply making space for a work like this is contribution enough. Sometimes all a platform has to do is open the door.

Train Dreams left me with a lingering stillness. A sense of something quiet but important passing through. I think that is the best a film can do.