By the time the credits rolled, I felt as though I had watched an entire life — fragile, lonely, unrecorded — unfold and disappear. And I knew that Train Dreams, the new Netflix film based on the 2011 novella, would be one of my favorite films of the year. Not because it dazzles, but because it listens. It listens to silence, to sorrow, to the people that linger with the American landscape, long after the country – and our collective memory – has moved on.
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton, in the best performance of his career) is not a hero in any cinematic sense. He is a laborer, a logger, a man who works with his hands because that is what the world allows him to do. His life begins in the rough camps of the Spokane International Railway, where men are hired not for their destiny but for their stamina. There, surrounded by dynamite blasts and steel rails, Robert witnesses the moment that will fracture something deep inside him: a Chinese worker thrown off a bridge by a group of white laborers.
The cruelty is quiet, almost casual — which renders it even more devastating and disturbing. The act is never interrogated, never punished. It simply becomes another story men tell to pass the time. But for Robert, it is a ghost. He dreams of the man often, dreams of him being struck by a train, dreams that feel less like nightmares and more like apologies spoken too late. The dreams, by the time the film ends, become an omen for the devastation to follow in Robert’s life.
This is the film’s first heartbreak: the quiet violence that America built its foundations on, and the ordinary men who watched and carried the guilt.
When railroad work dries up, Robert turns to seasonal logging, a trade that takes him away from his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their young daughter, Kate, for months at a time. The film does not sensationalize the distance — it simply shows it, soft and unjudging. The ache lives in the spaces between letters not sent, words not spoken, birthdays missed.
In the camps, Robert meets men who pass through his life like smoke rings: drifting in, taking shape, disappearing. Some leave impressions — a joke, a song, a kindness — and some leave scars.
He sees a logger murdered by a vigilante avenging his brother’s death — another swift, unceremonious erasure of a human life. He watches several co-workers crushed beneath a falling tree. Their graves are marked not by headstones, but by boots nailed to a trunk: a chilling, minimalist monument to people the world refused to remember.
And then, in the midst of all this brutality, Robert grows close to a fellow logger named Arn Peeples (played with warmth and weary humor). Arn represents something rare in Robert’s world: companionship without conditions. A brief friendship formed amid sawdust and sweat. But even this small mercy is stolen. Arn dies when a branch snaps and falls — sudden, arbitrary, cruel.
Every loss Robert experiences in this film is unsentimental, unadorned, unceremonious. As if the universe itself barely notices. And then comes the tragedy that defines Robert’s existence.
He returns from a season in the woods to find his home gone — reduced to charred remains. His valley, once alive with the sounds of his daughter’s laughter, smolders in silence. Gladys and Kate are missing, presumed dead, but the film never offers confirmation. It denies Robert — and us — the small mercy of certainty. This choice is devastating. It is also brilliant.
Because Train Dreams understands that there is a specific, terrible kind of grief in not knowing. In waking every day wondering if your family burned, or escaped, or simply vanished into the larger, indifferent churn of history. This grief does not scream. It lingers.
Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography frames the American West not as myth but as memory. Everything is softened by distance — the way the past feels when we look back at it decades later. Large, lonely landscapes swallow Robert whole. Forests loom with indifference. Rivers glitter with a kind of cold permanence. Nature continues. Progress continues. History continues.
Robert does not.
He becomes a relic — a man out of time, out of place, out of luck. And yet, what gives Train Dreams its emotional force is the way it finds humanity in his continued hope. For all the tragedies he has witnessed, for all the ghosts that sit beside him at night, Robert never extinguishes the possibility that the world might still hold some small mercy.
This is where the film becomes heartbreaking and inspiring all at once: because Robert refuses to surrender hope, even when hope seems like a fool’s inheritance.
In the end, Train Dreams is not just a story about one man. It is a story about the thousands of men like him — the railroad workers who dynamited mountains, the lumberjacks who vanished under falling branches, the immigrants erased by violence, the families lost to fire and time. Men and women whose lives were not failures, but whose stories were never written down.
The film writes them down without fanfare, nut with immense purpose.
And that, more than anything, is why it moved me.
For all its power, Train Dreams is not without its imperfections, though they are small and tender in their own way. The film’s pacing, so measured and meditative, occasionally drifts into stillness long enough that a few scenes feel more like pauses than progression. Some supporting characters flicker in and out so briefly that their presence registers more as symbols than as fully realized people — a deliberate choice, perhaps, but one that momentarily distances us from the intimacy the film otherwise cultivates. And there are stretches where the narration presses a little too hard on the film’s themes, spelling out what the images are already whispering beautifully on their own. Yet none of these flaws linger. They dissolve almost instantly into the film’s larger, aching truth. These minor stumbles don’t weaken the film; if anything, they make its emotional clarity feel even more miraculous, as though something this delicate should not, by all rights, work as well as it does.
Train Dreams is not loud. It is not flashy. It does not try to shock or surprise. Instead, it honors the ordinary. It grieves the forgotten. It gives voice to the nameless sorrow of people who lived and died without leaving a single mark on the official record of the world.
It is one of the quietest films of the year — and one of the most beautiful.
★★★★1/2
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