New On Netflix: What Dreams May Come

What Dreams May Come

Still one of the most visually stunning films of all time, What Dreams May Come paints a startling portrait of the afterlife as Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) dies in a car accident and goes to Heaven, a kind of ever-changing (and absolutely beautiful) abstract painting where everything is controlled and produced by his own mind. However, when his wife (Annabelle Sciorra) is unable to cope with the loss of both her husband and their two children from a couple of years earlier and commits suicide, Chris must journey into Hell (guided by Cuba Gooding, Jr., no less) in an attempt to rescue her soul. An extremely sentimentalized adaptation of Richard Matheson’s more scientific-minded novel (which makes it something of a companion piece to Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, released five years later), What Dreams May Come is a triumph of production design and visual effects — you get a sense that director Vincent Ward’s vision is complete and uncompromised, even if the screenplay (and the performances) could lose about a ten pounds of sugar. Max von Sydow adds some class with his all-too-brief appearance as a certain famous psychoanalyst (a playfully subversive touch in an otherwise unapologetically religious story).