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