Train Dreams Review: A Quiet, Crushing Beauty

We’re living in a time when everything demands urgency. Films, too — louder, faster, flashier — always trying to keep your attention from wandering. So when something like Train Dreams comes along, a film that invites you to sit still, to feel your way through it rather than be told what to feel, it hits differently. It’s not slow, exactly. It’s quiet. And in that quiet, it becomes something remarkable.

Directed by Clint Bentley and achingly adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams is a portrait of a man and a moment — both fading. Set in the rapidly changing American West of the early 1900s, it follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton, Boy Erased), a logger and railroad worker whose life unspools across a backdrop of expansion, isolation, and deep personal loss. The story is simple. But the feeling isn’t.

Grainier marries Gladys (Felicity Jones, The Brutalist), and they build a modest life with their daughter in the woods. It’s a life marked by long absences and hard labor, where love is expressed in shared routines more than words. And then something changes. I won’t say what. The film doesn’t dramatize it with music stabs or tears — it just lets the moment fall, like a tree in the forest, and asks you to notice the absence.

Edgerton is phenomenal here. He’s one of those actors people forget to rave about, but time and again, he proves how much weight he can carry with just a look or a pause. There’s a tendency to underestimate his work— he’s not flashy, not prone to “Oscar scenes” — but he has a gift for grounding a film and he finds a kind of spiritual honesty in every role. You believe him, not just in the dirt-under-the-fingernails realism, but in the way he listens, the way he misses people without saying it out loud.

Jones makes a lasting impression despite limited screen time — there’s a grounded grace to her, a woodsy elegance and strength that makes Gladys more than just a memory. Later in the film, Kerry Condon (Night Swim) shows up with a calm confidence that perfectly matches the film’s emotional tempo. She doesn’t play to the rafters — nobody does — but she hits exactly the frequency Train Dreams needs at that point in its journey.  William H. Macy (Ricky Stanicky) and Clifton Collins Jr. (Waves) also make brief but effective appearances, with Will Patton’s (Copycat) haunting narration adding a gently mythic frame.

Bentley, working again with co-writer Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing), creates a world that feels both specific and timeless. He’s not in a rush to explain anything. He just shows you a life — the kind that might’ve existed a hundred times over, unnoticed — and asks you to see the beauty in its passing. The film has less dialogue than you might expect, but it doesn’t feel sparse. It feels intentional. There’s room for you to project your own memories, your own people, into the gaps.

Visually, Train Dreams is stunning. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso captures the forests of Washington in all their damp, misty texture. It’s not just pretty — it feels like a space with stories. You can almost smell the pine, hear the crunch of boots on frosted ground. The costumes and production design are quietly immersive — no fuss, just the kind of realism that makes everything feel timeworn without drawing attention to itself. And then there’s Bryce Dessner’s score, which floored me. It moves with the film, never overwhelming it, but always heightening what’s already there. It’s not just passive background music — it shapes the mood and deepens the impact.

Train Dreams doesn’t force catharsis. It lingers. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t fully hit you until later — maybe that night, maybe days after. There’s a particular sting to it that sneaks up on you, not with melodrama, but with accumulated weight. Life, the film reminds us, isn’t always about grand gestures. Sometimes it’s just about staying upright after everything changes.

And in a year packed with loud awards bait and overly engineered dramas, I honestly don’t know if a film like Train Dreams will get the attention it deserves. But I hope it finds its people. The ones willing to put their phone down, lean in, and let it wash over them. This is the kind of film that would’ve packed indie theaters a decade ago. Now it’ll land on Netflix and shatter whoever’s lucky enough to hit play.

I first caught Train Dreams at TIFF, and it’s followed me ever since. Not in a sad way — just in that rare way some stories do when they show you a life that feels like it could’ve belonged to someone you know, or maybe someone you miss. Not every film has to shout to leave a mark. Some, like this one, just whisper. And somehow, that stays with you longer. Self-reinvention has always been an American pastime. But what Train Dreams proposes is that some lives never had the luxury of reinvention — they were just lived, one season, one loss, one swing of the axe at a time.