Film #19 — 1/1 Film with Dreams as Part of the Plot
By C. Ramsay
From Bernard Rose, director of the original Candyman, Paperhouse is about a young girl named Anna who uses a dreamworld she’s created by drawing in her school composition notebook to escape her struggles in real life. Using a touch of Solaris to establish this, the quiet emptiness of Anna’s initial visit to her dreamworld is then juxtaposed with the suffocating and endlessly busy city of her reality, made worse by the fact that she is trapped in a car with her mother driving while being scolded for her recent behaviour. Tonally, however, the film is most reminiscent of The Babadook—Anna being annoyingly whiny but still endearing, the script a touch repetitive in its dialogue, and the editing a bit too choppy to fully come together in a polished way.
Although the concept of drawings coming to life or generating an alternate realm is not unheard of, it also isn’t the most popular basis for a storyline. Relatedly, as the film is only loosely adapted from a novel, Bernard Rose was able to establish the lore and mechanics of the dreamworld as he desired, which was incredibly interesting to experience unfolding without knowing what would come next. The set design is gorgeous, with the house itself being faithful to the wonkiness of Anna’s drawing capabilities. Having been drawn with regular pencil, every part of the house is in drab sepia tone and is disorienting and cavernous, the walls only meant to create a sheltered space to contain the most imaginative components of Anna’s world. The dreamworld set and its dressings are stylistically similar to Terry Gilliam’s designs, and do a great job of solidifying the imagination of their creator, reflecting whimsy along with the underlying fear and unease that so easily creeps into the minds of children.
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