Strawberry Mansion — Poignant, Surreal Cinema

How far will companies go to sell their products? How far will they be willing to breach our privacy in the endless pursuit of consumerism? The answer for Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley, writers and directors of 2021’s Strawberry Mansion, is dreams.

The year is 2035. James Preble wakes up from a dream and instantly has to pay tax for it. He drives to a fast food joint where an automated AI voice forces more food into his order than he wants or needs. He obliges like the good, consuming citizen he is.

James is a tax auditor for dreams. The government has mandated increased surveillance measures everywhere. There is no escaping adverts. There is no escaping taxes. Strawberry Mansion’s dystopian future should sound familiar; it’s not a far-fetch from the present. Consumerism is increasing everyday and our privacy is becoming less and less private. Open a website and you are forced with popups asking whether you accept all cookies or not (as regulated by EU and UK laws). Don’t want to accept the mandatory ones? Well you can’t visit our website then. Some websites force you to uncheck optional ones in such a painstaking way that they’re obviously just hoping for us to give up and click accept. It’s scary stuff.

Birney and Audley tackle the issues of consumerism and privacy in a Gilliamesque surreal exploration of dreams. The colours are strikingly vibrant and the cinematography evokes feelings of nostalgia and déjà vu. This is a weird film, and it’s not going to be for everyone, but for fans of surreal cinema, Strawberry Mansion is a real treat.

Preble is called to an old woman named Bella’s house where he is tasked with inspecting all of her dream tapes in order to complete an audit. What should be a simple task spirals into absurdity as James witnesses heads explode, skeletons dance, a humanoid frog playing a saxophone, and eventually gets stuck on islands and ships for decades before crawling across the world as a caterpillar for centuries. This is all captured in beautiful, grainy ’70s style film with stop-motion animated segments and blended, saturated colours.

I call this film Gilliamesque mostly for its comparisons to 1985’s Brazil, where both explore notions of capitalism through a surreal, dystopian, hyper-surveilled future. Bella gives James a helmet at one point in Strawberry Mansion to block out the adverts forcing their way into his dreams. The prop design draws inspiration from Brazil but manages to stand on its own feet as its own succesful critique of society. The sets in Strawberry Mansion are iconic, from the pink dream-world room to the strawberry mansion itself, the design of each location will stay in one’s mind long after the credits have rolled.

Dan Deacon’s score plays an integral role in what makes the film so special. He uses swooping synthesizers and fluttering notes to capture the dream-like feel of the film. It perfectly transports us into this alternate world of weirdness. It’s not just a sci-fi soundtrack, it’s an ambient, surreal blend of Vangelis’ Blade Runner and Akira Yamaoka’s liminal Silent Hill.

Preble’s dreams are plagued with ads specifically from the fast food chain “Cap’n Kelly’s”, where buckets of chicken show up in all his dreams, and even appear in some of Bella’s. He becomes aware that something strange is going on, leading to the discovery of ads invading dreams. Preble starts to question his job but also his sanity and he struggles to differentiate between dream and reality.

He sees visions of a strange man in a ghillie suit, and a younger version of Bella starts talking to him at the dinner table. He hears whistling from an unknown direction and thinks he sees a beetroot move on his plate. When life starts to seem like a dream, something is definitely wrong. But how dream-like does reality have to become before people realise that there is more to life than blindly consuming?

Strawberry Mansion is a perfect, poignant film. It carries deeper messages under its seemingly innocent surreal surface, and serves as a real warning that we all need to wake up sooner rather than later.