Michel Franco’s Dreams operates under the assumption that its political prescience will be enough to sustain its relatively quick ninety-minute runtime. A portrait of a turbulent and toxic romance between Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) a rich socialite whose business is arts philanthropy, and Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a young, gifted ballet dancer from Mexico City who has trained at the academy which Jennifer’s extraordinarily wealthy family funds, Dreams deconstructs the parasitic relationship between the 1% and undocumented immigrants with club-footed grace. Franco is no stranger to blunt force, especially around dramatic representations of class warfare. His film New Order imagined what an uprising would feel like from the perspective of the bourgeoisie in a way that never really solidified his politics as anything but suspect. Dreams is clearer in its approach, but its focus through the eyes of a white woman oozing money does beggar a sense of empathy that the film doesn’t really offer. Despite a series of beautiful gowns worn by Chastain, the film doesn’t offer much intrigue nor sociopolitical interest, instead reducing itself to the lowest common denominator by the time it reaches its exceedingly cruel ending.
Dreams Reifies The Very Violence of the American Dream It Means To Criticize

Jennifer and Fernando have been carrying on this illicit affair for some time. The serious age gap between them is only mirrored by their extreme wealth gap. It is a sexually charged relationship that perpetuates itself via playful bouts of power play, compounded by its continuation more or less dependent on how often Jennifer is able to steal away on her private jet to visit him under the auspices of needing to visit the Mexico City academy. But when he visits her, he can only do so under the cover of night, since he has already been deported once, from New York, back in 2013. Yet, his love — or lust, or opportunism, it’s not always easy to tell — drives him to risk his life by crossing through Texas and hitchhiking to San Francisco to surprise her. When it becomes clear that Jennifer’s love for him only extends as far as she can keep him a secret and away from her considerably high-profile social standing, Fernando decides to break up with her — which sets off a series of plot contrivances that eventually bring to him being considered for the lead role at the San Francisco Ballet. A woman of no financial limits, Jennifer is not used to being toyed with, and goes out of her way to win Fernando back at the very real risk of her career. Though she runs her arts foundation with her brother, Jake (Rupert Friend) and with money from her father, Michael (Marshall Bell), she is the only one in this family that seems to have any genuine concern for the rights of immigrants, though it becomes clearer and clearer that her money is merely a mask for her extreme whiteness. While publicly the McCarthy Foundation touts help for the “underprivileged,” Jake secretly bemoans the idea of helping people who “aren’t American,” and Jennifer perpetually uses voice-to-chat translation when speaking to anyone Mexican. There is a certain refreshing quality to the directness of Franco’s film, which lays out in pretty succinct ways the argument that the rich are only interested in immigrants so long as they can be exploited or controlled. Very little time is spent on anything extraneous; Dreams moves about from scene to scene with a slavish devotion to linearity. But that is true too of its commentary, which could not be more obvious if it tried. Given that most undocumented immigrants are threatened without ever having to make face-to-face contact with someone so wealthy as Jennifer, the film feels both extreme and miniscule all at once. Franco means to speak to the inherent lopsided relationship between two classes on the fringes of the spectrum, but he can only do so through a story that is fairly preposterous, and in settings that are wildly uncommon.

That doesn’t make the film unworthy of time, it just means that it is engineered for knowing nods of recognition rather than more incisive reflection. Watching Chastain parade around San Francisco and Mexico City with Chanel jewelry and Yves Saint-Laurent bags as an Escalade escorts her wherever she needs to go, all the while her boy toy is relegated to the muddy marshes of the Texas backwater is well-taken but too crass. So too is the film’s final sequence of events, which seriously call into question the cogency of Franco’s ideas. Meanwhile, Yves Cape’s camera passively watches as this bizarro Babygirl continues onwards, and the truth is that nothing is really all that interesting here beyond Franco’s anger, but even that is not communicated with any sense of urgency. Yes, the American Dream feels more like an ironic and antiquated ideal nowadays, but treating his own subjects with abject cruelty only seems to reify the very thing he means to criticize.
Dreams releases theatrically on February 27th, 2026.

Release Date

February 27, 2026

Runtime

95 Minutes

Director

Michel Franco

Writers

Michel Franco

Producers

Alexander Rodnyansky, Eréndira Núñez Larios, Michel Franco