Some movies are meant to move you with their cinematography, score, or performances. Train Dreams manages to use all three to devastate its audience and it is a captivating watch from start to finish.

Joel Edgerton stars as Robert, a man who worked on the railroad and as a lumberjack throughout his life. With stunning shots of Robert in the golden hour, surrounded by trees, you never quite know where Train Dreams is heading but the Clint Bentley film allows its audience to embark on a journey of love, loss, and dedication with Robert that is soft and sweet in a surprising way.

We are often forced into a character’s emotion without really understanding who they are. But Train Dreams brings the audience into Robert’s story with Will Patton’s narration over the entire film. Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar use the story of Robert’s life, as told by Patton, as their main source of dialogue throughout the film. There are moments with Edgerton and Felicity Jones, who plays Robert’s wife Gladys, where you can hear each character speaking, but the main arc of the film is told through Patton.

Train Dreams is based on the short story by Denis Johnson, and Bentley and Kwedar do a great job of adapting the style of a short story into the one hour and forty-three minutes of Train Dreams. But what really makes this movie special is the cinematography by Adolpho Veloso. It is a visually stunning movie that, on paper, could have just been snapshots of Robert’s life, and audiences would have loved it.

But Bentley and Kwedar weave a heartbreaking and beautiful story in the midst of the golden hour moments of Veloso’s vision. Robert’s family is his happiness, and the lightness of those moments reflects that. His darker moments are shot with less light, less brilliance, and it is a beautiful exploration of how the look and feel of a movie can tell you a lot about what a character is going through.

There are beautiful moments in Robert’s life that stay with the audience, like the last few moments of him finally seeing the world from a different view (quite literally). But what makes Train Dreams feel like something special is the quiet sadness that Edgerton’s Robert possesses.

He’s never visibly angry or allows his upset to consume him as we so often see in the media. Instead, his sadness is quiet and all-consuming and it bleeds into how the audience watches this film. We’re there with Robert, we feel his pain and want answers to what happened with his family.

At its core, Train Dreams is a story of grief and how everyone undertakes it differently. Robert’s is soft and determined, even while he’s in denial. But it is beautiful to see how this man’s dedication to his family and the loss he found throughout his life led him. It also helps that Train Dreams is just a beautiful movie to watch as well.

Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.

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