Strawberry Mansion Review: Dream Logic Triumphs In Lynchian Sci-Fi

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Few directors are able to truly grasp dream logic and the surreal flights of fancy that accompany such subject matters. David Lynch’s name comes to mind, given his ability to craft dense, intricate narratives surrounding the imaginary and the waking world, along with the gray area between the two. While the term «Lynchian» is often misconstrued and overused, applied to anything and everything that defies comprehension from a surrealist point of view, this is exactly how Albert Birney and Kentucky Audley’sStrawberry Mansion can be defined. Combining the delightful and the absurd, Strawberry Mansion is a sweet triumph, an ode to imagination, and a manifesto on the wonders of love.

The year is 2035, yet every frame in Strawberry Mansion is saturated with nostalgia pieces  — as if the future isn’t quite ready to let go of the past. James Preble (Audley) is a dream auditor for the U.S. government; his job is to evaluate the taxes levied on items in dreams. Yes, the future is peaked with capitalist invasions into personal dream spaces and every individual must upload their dreams via a device so as to allow the government to assign tax values to them. While Preble carries out his job with diligence, his own dreams are saturated in fuchsia pink, where a recurring figure (Linas Phillips) shows up with commercial items for Preble to consume. And consume he does, when he is wide awake, subconsciously puppeteered by the dream ads to buy products (although he is unaware of the same in the beginning).

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Enter Anabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), an elderly widow who has not filed her dream taxes in years, as they have been recorded on endless VHS tapes instead of the mandatory