A few nights into a mysterious university sleep study, Sarah finds herself perusing a bookshop, pulled towards the Phillip K. Dick entries on the shelf. Jeremy, her primary researcher and maybe-stalker, suggests she give Dick a read, referring to his work as “hauntingly sad”. This description – hauntingly sad – accurately captures the weirdly affecting (and low-key terrifying) tonality of Come True, a descent into sleep paralysis and ancestral nightmares coming to life. Vividly tragic, but always in a darkly unspeakable way, Come True captures that in-between realm separating sleep and dreams and twists it into a malevolent manifesto about the collective terror that lingers in the mysterious netherworld of slumber.

We begin the journey with Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), a high school student on the run. Living at a nearby park when she’s not crashing with friends, there is an inscrutable quality to Sarah, who remains a cryptic character throughout. From her distance from her family to what drives her to be so inextricably concerned for those who spend the night with her, Sarah and her past remain unknowable. She’s a dreamlike sketch in a sense, who becomes more and more distant the closer you get to her. Even as she descends deeper into the scientific sleep study, an opportunity for both a regular bed and a little bit of spending money, she’s at arm’s length from all around her. Things start to turn sinister when the experiment uncovers a kind of mass hallucination, all the subjects bearing witness to the same haunting image of a malevolent shadow being, and Sarah soon is driven further from all in her network and closer to the cusp of sanity.

Articulate, unique, and – most importantly – scary, Come True is a low-fi tech-driven, but innately primal, fever dream into the subconscious. In the primordial soup of collective mythology, a mysterious minatory shadow-man with burning white eyes lurks and his looming figure haunts the whole of the film. Like Nightmare on Elm Street mashed with the 70s social psychology that brought about The Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Shock Experiment, Come True imagines if Freddy Krueger was brought to life with hard science and the result is effectively sinister, if never explosively scary.

Rather, the sci-fi-tinged horror-mystery is a menacing slow-burn with splashes of the works of Benson and Moorhead, Shane Carruth, and the Wachowskis. Those willing to sink into the mythos and psychology of this methodical creeper will find untold riches – and a horror movie that really digs its teeth in deep and threatens restless nights ahead – though more casual viewers expecting outbursts of shock fear tactics, explicit antagonism, and concrete plotting may be less riveted throughout and ultimately left off-kilter by its far-out final frames.

Writer and director Anthony Scott Burns broaches the notion of sleep paralysis and its innate terror from experience. Having suffered sleep paralysis in his youth, Burns states, “When people are in this state, they often seem to see the exact same thing: dark shadows with eyes watching over them. Science obviously declares this a mass hallucination, but you have to wonder…Why do people see the same thing?” A haunting prospect indeed and one that, taken in conjunction with the hypnotic VFX that sucks viewers in and out of a nightmarish gothic underworld, feels brought to life in terrifying detail.

The dark dreamscape synth soundtrack from Electric Youth (who performed Drive’s iconic jam ‘A Real Hero’) and PilotPriest (Burns’ musical pseudonym) amplify these feelings of unease and kick the anxious unease into overdrive. As the sleep study progresses and the line between dream and reality blur further and further, Come True offers no simple answers, clawing deeper and deeper into the dark, trippy rabbit hole and threatening to trap viewers in roughshod dream logic. Like with the most terrifying of nightmares, the only way out is through.

CONCLUSION: Sustained tension and an entirely creepy visual palette make ‘Come True’, a dreamy horror-hybrid about sleep paralysis, a heady haunter. Anthony Scott Burns announces himself as a thoughtful and novelly scary voice in the horror genre.