Dreamcatcher

Showtime Networks | Release Date: March 20, 2015

6.3	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Ratings

USER RATING DISTRIBUTION

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

Watch Now

Stream On

Review this movie

VOTE NOW

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Please sign in or create an account before writing a review.

Check box if your review contains spoilers

0 characters (5000 max)

User Reviews

User score By date Most helpful

DRauchDoes2015May 28, 2015

I've seen the term 'harrowing' pop up as a frequent descriptor in many of the reviews I've read for Dreamcatcher. While it is entirely apt, I feel it may conjure the impression of a different movie, one more focused on shock-value kitchenI've seen the term 'harrowing' pop up as a frequent descriptor in many of the reviews I've read for Dreamcatcher. While it is entirely apt, I feel it may conjure the impression of a different movie, one more focused on shock-value kitchen sink melodrama. A more fitting phrase would be 'heart-wrenching'. Yes, this is a gritty, horrifying documentary. But I've yet to see another this year with such all-encompassing empathy and understanding of the human condition at it's lowest point.

There are few non-fiction works of cinema that take aim at a world so horrendous I can hardly come to terms with it's very existence. Dreamcatcher, the latest from director Kim Longinotto, takes a long hard stare at rampant prostitution and the broken women who've fallen prey to a life of addiction, desperation, and seemingly hopeless circumstances. To call it affecting would be an understatement: this movie is absolutely riveting.

The film centers around Brenda Myers-Powell, founder of the titular Dreamcatcher Foundation, an organization that seeks to help individual women escape the trappings of the sex industry. The group, whose ethos is that of mutual understanding, respect, and solidarity, fights the good fight but goes about it in a way that is wholly modern and practical.

What is most fascinating about how Brenda works to wean victims away from prostitution is how incredibly personal, natural, and blunt her interactions are. She makes it painfully clear that her life once held the same bleak visage as those she is trying to save, and that the real way to help another human being is to understand where they are in life and what aid they simultaneously need and are willing to accept. Brenda's dialogues with these women subtly hint toward the idea that the best thing for someone in a terrible place is understanding above all else. Not feigned, obligatory compassion but a real, lived-in comprehension of a shared mindset.

Numerous firsthand accounts of physical and sexual violence are detailed by former (and current) prostitutes and they are truly shocking. The film allows it's various subjects to speak freely and depict the lifestyle they've become sucked into devoid of trashy sensationalism or didactic moralizing. I'd complain that the overall incessant misery becomes emotionally draining, but the stories are so brazen that they uplift for their sheer realism. You aren't being cheated or manipulated here with a false aggrandizement of squalor and hard times - these women are living in a nightmare often trivialized by stereotyping and flippant disregard. Dreamcatcher reminds us, vividly, of the humanity beneath the oppression.

It's a **** existence, no other way to phrase it.

Luckily, Brenda is here to help these women. Her job is, though certainly not thankless, an underrepresented work of social justice on the ground level. She resists the fatigue of her worn, battle-scarred, aging body and strives all hours of the day to assuage the constant suffering of those around her. She talks to women about their lives with an empathy that is marrow-deep. Her objective is always clear, but she never oversteps her bounds or forces a decision on one of her cases. Their lives are their own and Brenda acknowledges the trickiness of navigating the mentality of someone institutionalized to feed into their cesspool of grief, because she's lived it.

Dreamcatcher's greatest attribute, without discounting it's already transfixing, hypnotic look at destitution, is how it examines the mentality of those ingrained in prostitution. These stories demand to be heard, but the truly revelatory takeaway of Dreamcatcher is the humanization of the systematic victimization of people with no other alternative but to plunge further into the abyss. This is where the film transcends mere journalistic reporting and becomes an insightful, affecting work of art. Longinotto captures with unsettling lucidity the emotional realism of these circumstances, and nothing is more disquieting than when the audience is recounted stories from a former pimp himself.

I forget his name, but his speeches, elaborating on the abuse he himself endured as well as the fleshed-out, manipulative mentality he acquired in order to thrive in the pimp-game, are a thing of distressing magnetism. Dreamcatcher would have been a fine expose if it had centered solely on the female victims, but to gain access to a man willing to confess to his lifetime of odious, amorality without depicting his motivation as purely one-dimensional provides a depth of understanding that is something I've never seen before. His stories floored me, not because they were graphic, but because I could fathom his reasoning. I grew to empathize and even pity him.

Dreamcatcher left me exhausted in the best possible way. There hasn't been a film yet this year that impacted me more deeply.… Expand

1 of 2 users found this helpful11

All this user's reviews