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If you are anything like me, a period drama about a forlorn logger isn’t exactly screaming “top of my watchlist!” But as a once-skeptical viewer now singing its praises, let me explain why Netflix’s “Train Dreams” is one of this year’s best films.
“Train Dreams” follows Robert Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton, a logger in the rural Pacific Northwest who is helping build the railroads of the American West in the early 1900s. Over the 80 years of Grainier’s life, he experiences love, tragedy, hardship, and the relentless pace of a world changing around him. The film highlights dramatic milestones of his life and the quiet moments in between, creating a portrait of a man and a nation.
Edgerton’s performance is instantly captivating, grounding the film with its vulnerability. The supporting cast, with players like Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon, and William H. Macy, each capitalize on their small moments of screen time to imbue the film with pathos. I am sometimes hesitant about the crutch of narration, but Will Patton’s voice brilliantly facilitates a deeper connection with our soft-spoken lead.
Promotional trailer for “Train Dreams” (2025) (Credit: Netflix via YouTube).
Clint Bentley directed the movie and co-wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar, adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella. Bentley and Kwedar were the duo behind one of my favorite movies of last year, “Sing Sing.” Their ability to have emotion pour out of a screen and find that perfect tonal sweet spot of shattering sadness and uplifting wonderment strikes again in this iteration of their creative partnership.
Despite its historic setting, the questions posed by “Train Dreams” slot effortlessly into our modern landscape. It is the story of a man involved in the major points of American progress, not an inventor, not a politician, but a man who lives in rural America who is inherently connected to the land and the forces reshaping it. This intimate portrait of an ordinary man, and the journey through his life, is a journey through American history. Spanning decades, “Train Dreams” allows the viewer to really feel the breakneck speed at which our nation was developing in the 1900s. The film asks urgent questions about the casualties of progress, the impact of industry on rural environments, and the complicated, often painful relationship people maintain with the land they depend on.
William H. Macy and Joel Edgerton in “Train Dreams” (2025) (Credit: Netflix via IMDb).
The movie grapples with personal questions of how to cope with insurmountable grief and a rapidly changing world that keeps moving even when it feels like your own life has stopped. Granier’s emotional paralysis stands in stark contrast to the roaring forward motion of modernity, creating a tension between personhood and the machine of society.
For a mostly gentle film, an area where “Train Dreams” is not subtle is in the grandiose and awe-inspiring cinematic depictions of its rural setting and natural landscapes. This is the kind of cinematography that makes me yearn for a large theatrical release. The environment around the characters is made to feel so monumental, inspirational, and dangerous all at once.
In many ways, 2025 has been a year of movies reckoning with the tumultuous aftermath of humanity’s ideas of progress. Movies like Ari Aster’s “Eddington” and Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia” both invoke dark comedy to interrogate the contradictions and chaos embedded in modern systems of power and advancement. But where those films are louder and more confrontational, “Train Dreams” is soft and poetic and, from my perspective, more effective in its lessons. “Train Dreams” offers a devastating and moving meditation on what is lost and gained in the name of progress and what it means to live a life entangled with a world much larger than oneself.
This is a movie that sneaks up on you and then refuses to let you go.
“Train Dreams” is now streaming on Netflix.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post ‘Train Dreams’ Tracks Story of Rural Progress and Loss in the 20th Century appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
