Movie Review: Train Dreams

I have recently found myself mentally tagging some films as “Book Club Movies”. It’s not a reference to their quality—anyone who’s ever joined a book club knows the monthly picks can swing wildly on that front. Rather, it’s about a certain novelistic feel that the movie evokes. Maybe it’s the structure, maybe it’s the presence of a narrator, maybe it’s the abundance of moments that feel engineered for discussion. Whatever the cause, you know it when you see it. There have been quite a few Book Club Movies in 2025, though perhaps none have embodied the term more than Train Dreams, itself based on the 2011 novella of the same name by Denis Johnson.

The film traces the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), who arrived in the town of Bonners Ferry, Idaho as an orphan child having never known his birth parents. As a young man, he sees Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones) heading into church and is immediately smitten. Before long the pair are wed, have constructed a charming little cabin along the shore of the Moyie River, and have given birth to a daughter.

Robert works as a logger, which takes him away from his family for large stretches of time each year, and eventually gets work constructing a massive bridge for the Spokane International Railway. He had always had a mildly romantic notion of his work before that, fondly recalling the diverse personalities he encountered each season, but when he witnesses a group of white workers execute a Chinese laborer for murky, unspoken reasons, that romance curdles. Feeling that he could have done more to prevent the other man’s death, he starts to feel haunted by him in dreams and wonders if perhaps his inaction has caused him to be cursed. As the story follows the ensuing decades of his life, several great tragedies do befall him, furthering his belief that he is being punished. But there is kindness and beauty in his existence as well, if only he can open his eyes to appreciate it.

Will Patton’s warm, weathered narration threads the various vignettes of Robert’s life together, immediately lending the movie a novel-like feel. There’s a charming folksiness to both his delivery and some of the lines that when combined with the opening moments’ romanticized rush through what was likely a fairly difficult childhood immediately endears the viewer to the film. Edgerton is all understated emotion as the kind yet strong Robert, only breaking down when the ghosts of his memories become too much to bear in a truly remarkable performance.

Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is without recent parallel. The woods of the Pacific Northwest are captured in pristine, awe-inspiring detail and even the smallest gestures of daily life receive the same attentive framing. Complimented by Bryce Dessner’s score, the effect is elegiac; an ode to a time and place long since lost to time, in which the players seem to understand on some level that they are playing a part in its disappearance.

Written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar and directed by the former (swapping their roles from last year’s Sing Sing), Train Dreams feels unusually attuned to both the natural world and the fragile interiority of its characters. By zeroing in on one man’s quiet journey to experience and understand the most fundamental pieces of what make life worth living while having them repeatedly ripped away, the filmmakers have crafted something haunting and moving. An intimate epic, this is a story about love and loss, life and death, time and memory, remorse and redemption, endered in miniature yet emotionally vast.

When the narration concludes with Robert’s late‑life realization that he “felt, at last, connected to it all,” the effect is quietly overwhelming. The film leaves you with a sharpened sense of your own place in the world, and a renewed gratitude for the fleeting gifts that shape a life. ★★★★★