There’s something instantly unsettling about seeing a fully dressed person underwater – a visual motif perhaps most memorably deployed in The Piano, with Holly Hunter pulled into the ocean in full Victorian garb.
The domestic abuse-themed Australian drama Life Could Be a Dream opens with a similarly haunting vision: a woman in a white dress suspended beneath the surface, engulfed in drifting clouds of blackness, the frame bathed in murky blue tones.
The water metaphors continue in the very next scene, with the woman – 40-year-old real estate agent Sarah (Maeve Dermody) – holding her nose while underwater in a bath. These moments aren’t subtle, though the film earns its heaviness given the weight of its central subject. Domestic abuse remains an underexplored topic in Australian cinema, the best local film so far to tackle it directly being Noora Niasari’s deeply engrossing 2023 drama Shayda.
In Life Could Be a Dream, director Jasmin Tarasin introduces a fragmentary approach, initially bringing the vibes of a half-remembered dream, weaving in visions of a wedding party. This is clearly a happy occasion: big smiles, applause, a twirl on the dancefloor. But the dark and dank colour grading squeezes all warmth from the moment, reminding me of the opening scene in Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which similarly sucks all the joy out of a wedding.
Gradually, narrative details are revealed. We learn that Sarah has decided to escape her coercively controlling marriage to Jake (Alexander England), with whom she has a 13-year-old son, Otis (Sonny McGee). She has taken Otis with her to a vacant mansion, soon to be put on the market, where they play a cute game, pretending they’re on an overseas vacation. Most of the film’s scenes unfold between Sarah and Otis alone, giving the drama an intimate, close-quartered feel, augmented by flashbacks to moments in Sarah and Jake’s marriage.
The structure deployed by screenwriter Courtney Collins is pared back, with virtually no subplots or narrative detours, aside from those flashbacks and a thread involving Jake’s current movements. But visually the film is intensely polished – cinematographer Meg White has found rich textures everywhere. When Sarah and Otis eat fish and chips by the coast, hot damn, that fried flake sure looks sumptuous – batter glowing gold, globs of oil glistening in the light.
This scene demonstrates the film’s ability to make small moments painfully resonant. As the pair eat, Otis shares with Sarah something Jake told him: “Women, they exaggerate.” Sonny McGee skilfully delivers this line in a way that makes it clear, without applying highlight pen, that the boy is conflicted. He looks up to his father but senses something troubling in those words; something he’s not yet old or wise enough to fully process.
Dermody’s performance is also carefully layered, and she carries herself with gravitas, conveying a woman split between outward composure and inner turmoil: physically present but mentally elsewhere, shadowed by exhaustion and fear. Sarah is not only dealing with the trauma of her marriage but how to guide her child through it, wrestling with very tough questions, for instance what to reveal to him, and how to protect him without obscuring the truth. She explains things carefully, choosing words such as “the way your dad is with me I need you to know that that is not OK”. The writing, direction and acting reflect an understanding that there are no perfect scripts for conversations like these.
The richness of these characters and performances, and the drama’s tightly concentrated focus, compensate for a final act that doesn’t entirely cohere, ultimately feeling more unresolved than genuinely open-ended. Although, from another perspective, in many ways, that’s life: the trauma of the past never fully leaves us, and the stories of our lives are never wrapped up in neat bows. This is a powerful, memorable film.
• Life Could Be a Dream is in Australian cinemas from 14 May
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
