Berlin International Film Festival, drama, Eligio Melendez, film festivals, Isaac Hernandez, Jessica Chastain, Marshall Bell, Mercedes Hernandez, Michel Franco, movies, reviews, Rupert Friend
March 1, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Michel Franco
Some language in Spanish with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in the United States and in Mexico, the dramatic film “Dreams” features a predominantly white and Latin cast of characters (with some Asians and African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A rich middle-aged socialite and an undocumented immigrant dancer, who’s about 10 to 15 years younger than she is, have a torrid and scandalous affair, which is affected by their differences in socioeconomic status, racial identities, ages, U.S. citizenship status, and their conflicting expectations of what they want out of this relationship.
Culture Audience: “Dreams” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and dramas about age-gap sexual relationships that show some of life’s harsh realities.
Flawed but well-acted and very compelling, “Dreams” subverts expectations of stories about two obsessive lovers who come from very different worlds. People who want this drama to be an underdog romance or a “Fatal Attraction”-type movie will be disappointed. “Dreams” has a lot to say about the central couple’s differences in their socioeconomic status, racial identities, ages and U.S. citizenship status. However, when the story takes a very dark turn in the last third of the movie, the intent is to show how similar these two people are when they make certain decisions to get what they want.
Written and directed by Michel Franco, “Dreams” had its world premiere at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. The movie takes place in various parts of the United States and in Mexico, but most of the story happens in San Francisco and in Mexico City. “Dreams” was filmed on location in San Francisco.
“Dreams” begins in a remote outdoor field in San Antonio, Texas. A group of undocumented Latin American immigrants are locked inside a large truck overnight by the traffickers who illegally transported them there and have temporarily left the immigrants in the truck. The immigrants are panicking and shouting to be let out of the truck.
Eventually, the traffickers open the back door of the truck and order the immigrants to get into another vehicle. However, one of these immigrants—a Mexican man in his early-to-mid 30s named Fernando Rodríguez (played by Isaac Hernández)—decides he’s had enough of being treated like cattle. Fernando walks away by himself, into the field and toward the highway, where he hopes to find motorists who are willing to take him to San Francisco.
Fernando ends up getting several rides until he reaches his destination: an upscale San Francisco townhouse, which he enters. Fernando slips into a bedroom, takes off his clothes, and goes to sleep in the bed. The townhouse’s owner—Jennifer McCarthy (played by Jessica Chastain), a wealthy philanthropist bachelorette in her mid-to-late 40s—arrives home at night and sees Fernando sleeping in her bed. Jennifer calmly asks Fernando how he got there, and he tells her. Jennifer and Fernando then have sex, in one of the movie’s sex scenes that are erotic but not overly graphic.
Who is Fernando and why did he go through the risks of coming to the United States illegally? Bits and pieces of information are revealed in conversations throughout the movie. Fernando is an aspiring professional ballet dancer from Mexico City. He met Jennifer in Mexico City, when he was a student at one of the dance schools and arts programs that get funding from the non-profit foundation that Jennifer co-founded with her younger brother Jake McCarthy (played by Rupert Friend), who also lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jennifer and Jake are the children of a powerful San Francisco-based business mogul named Michael McCarthy (played by Marshall Bell), a widower whose fortune is the backbone of his children’s philanthropic efforts. Jake and Jennifer take pride in helping young people from underprivileged backgrounds. Jennifer and Jake also work for the family’s company, whose specialty is in property development.
Jake is married with children. Jennifer is a divorced loner who is medically infertile. Jake and Jennifer have a cordial sibling relationship. However, there are indications that they’ve had a long-term sibling rivalry over who will get their father’s approval the most. This rivalry is seen when Jennifer and Jake have their occasional bickering.
“Dreams” does not have flashbacks showing how Jennifer’s affair with Fernando began. However, the relationship is passionate enough where Fernando decided to leave his life behind in Mexico to become an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco. It seems as if Jennifer casually told Fernando that he could stay with her if he was ever in San Francisco, but she didn’t think he would take up this offer by illegally crossing the U.S. border to live in San Francisco.
Although Jennifer offers to give Fernando money for financial support, Fernando (who comes from a middle-class family) has no intention of being Jennifer’s “kept man” because he wants to make his own money as a professional dancer. He’s willing to take menial jobs to support himself as he works toward this goal. Later in the movie, Fernando reveals that he was deported from the U.S. years before he knew Jennifer.
A few scenes in the movie show Fernando’s unnamed parents have different reactions to Fernando and Jennifer’s unorthodox relationship. Fernando’s father (played by Eligio Meléndez) is mostly neutral and doesn’t really tell Fernando what to do with his life. Fernando’s mother (played by Mercedes Hernández) is very outspoken in telling Fernando and Jennifer that she disapproves of their relationship because Fernando’s mother says that Jennifer has hurt Fernando before. Needless to say, Fernando’s mother wants him to break up with Jennifer and come back to Mexico City.
At first, Jennifer and Fernando spend a blissful few weeks in each other’s company after he arrives in San Francisco. But then, Fernando sees indications that Jennifer is not ready to fully let Fernando inside her high-society world. Fernando asks Jennifer if she’s embarrassed by him. Jennifer denies it, but Fernando feels continuously disrespected by Jennifer and feels growing resentment toward her that she’s treating him like a “boy toy” or plaything.
This review won’t reveal what happens in this relationship except to say it’s volatile and goes through some twists and turns. The trailer for “Dreams” shows Jennifer stalking Fernando after a breakup. But that’s only part of what happens in the movie.
Jennifer and Fernando care about each other, but is it love? That’s highly debatable. And what do they want out of their relationship besides sex? The movie tends to wander in some scenes, but “Dreams” should maintain the interest of viewers who are curious about what will happen next in this story that can be considered a psychological thriller.
Chastain gives a nuanced and complex performance as Jennifer, who has dual sides to her personality. Jennifer is level-headed and professional in the workplace, but when it comes to her personal life, Jennifer is impulsive and deeply insecure. Hernández’s performance is a little rough around the edges (and so is Fernando’s personality), but he has a naturalistic style that makes Fernando a believable character. The other cast members’ performances are serviceable.
“Dreams” isn’t really a movie about sex or love. It’s about power, control, and what people might do to get, take or hold on to power and control. “Dreams” shows the perspectives of Jennifer and Fernando, as they get caught up in a toxic relationship where their differences both fuel and defy the power struggles in the relationship. It’s a movie that’s intended to make people uncomfortable because it doesn’t follow a typical formula and it doesn’t take a morality stance on some of the awful things that happen in the story.
The movie’s direction and tone skillfully convey the anxieties that each person in the relationship feels. Fernando lives in fear of being reported to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and becomes alarmed when Jennifer refuses to accept a breakup that Fernando initiates. Jennifer lives in fear of losing control of her double life that she enjoys having (Fernando in one part of her life, and her family in another) and becomes alarmed when she feels that her power is being challenged or taken away.
“Dreams” also depicts the different forms of bigotry that can occur when two people in this type of relationship come from very different backgrounds and demographics. Jennifer and her family have a subtle type of racism, where they think they’re not racists because they do a lot of charity work that benefits a lot of people of color. However, the McCarthy family’s white supremacist racism is shown by how the McCarthys are only comfortable being around people who aren’t white if the people who aren’t white are in subservient or inferior positions to white people such as the McCarthys.
“Dreams” is a divisive movie that will frustrate or annoy people who expect the story to go a certain way, based on how this type of relationship is depicted in many other films. The movie asks provocative questions about how much trust people can have in sex partners whom they might not know very well. There are also disturbing depictions of what certain people will do if they think someone has destroyed that trust or threatens to upend their ideas of how they want their lives to be. Far from being a safe and romantic story, “Dreams” could have this adage as a subtitle: “Life is not a fairytale.”
Greenwich Entertainment released “Dreams” in select U.S. cinemas on February 27, 2026. The movie was released in Mexico on September 11, 2025.