Cassandra’s Dream (2007)0

Cassandra’s Dream is a film by Woody Allen. The story is about two broth­ers, Terry and Ian, who bought a boat together and soon after, faced a series of inci­dents that befell the both of them. Colin Farrell plays along­side Ewan McGregor in this sus­pen­sive thriller that really high­lights the mean­ing of the say­ing “blood is thicker than water”. Both Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor’s char­ac­ters are under­achiev­ers; des­per­ate to break out of their mediocre lives to achieve every­thing they have ever dreamt about hav­ing. They both look up to their uncle, who is a suc­cess­ful sur­geon.  The two broth­ers, faced with finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, are thrilled when their uncle comes to visit them. However, they are taken by sur­prise when he asks them to kill a man named Martin Burns for him, in order to save his rep­u­ta­tion and pre­vent him from going to jail. Unwilling at first, they agreed to help their uncle as they really needed the money from him. The close rela­tion­ship between the broth­ers starts to spi­ral out of con­trol when Colin Farrell’s char­ac­ter, Terry, is rid­den with guilt after the mur­der and Ewan McGregor’s char­ac­ter, Ian, is wor­ried about his brother ruin­ing every­thing for him. He is then faced with a deci­sion of whether or not to kill his brother to save his own life. I think there are mes­sages that are being put through in this film. One of them is the mes­sage of how far a per­son is will­ing to go for the sake of their own dreams. The other mes­sage that is being con­stantly empha­sised in the film is that fam­ily is always the most impor­tant. To quote Ian and Terry’s mother, “All you can count on in this life is fam­ily.” Ironically, in the film, Ian ends up plot­ting a way to kill his own brother; an action he even­tu­ally did not carry out. What I liked about this film is that the story is con­tin­u­ously mov­ing for­ward. One action leads to another, and deci­sions, whether right or wrong, are con­stantly being made. From the start of the film where Ian and Terry agree to buy the boat together, to Terry’s gam­bling maneu­vers, their mur­der plans, right till Ian’s plot to kill Terry. My favourite scene in the film is their first attempt to kill Martin Burns. The ten­sion in the scene was build­ing up from the moment they sneaked into his house to wait for him to return home, to when he came home with a girl, which com­pletely ruined their plan. I thought the twist was very clever, and the entire scene also man­aged to reveal more infor­ma­tion about the char­ac­ters. We could see that Terry was the more com­pas­sion­ate char­ac­ter, when he refused to kill the girl. And it was this com­pas­sion that con­tributed to his guilt and remorse, which pushed the story along fur­ther. Even the shots in most of the scenes are con­stantly mov­ing. There are a lot of slow, almost unno­tice­able zoom-ins used. Also, in the scene where Ian fills his brother’s beer with the med­i­c­i­nal pow­der, the cam­era zooms in tightly on him to accen­tu­ate his highly per­turbed emo­tions at the time. Finally, the music used in the film was very appro­pri­ate. Composed by Philip Glass, it cre­ated and inten­si­fied the antic­i­pa­tion in the scenes. The only thing I wasn’t sat­is­fied with was the way the film ended. I felt that it was an easy way out to have Ian acci­den­tally killed, and Terry then com­mit­ting sui­cide. However, it was still very unex­pected, and resolved the plot, so it still worked out. I give this film 4 out of 5 stars. – Reviewed by Marjorie Teo