Dream Horse
This is standard low budget cinematic fare, elevated by the presence of Toni Collette.
Small-town Welsh bartender Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) is having a crisis of sorts - floating through life with a severe depressive turn, looking for something to hold her interest now her kids have flown the nest and her husband Brian (Owen Teale) has replaced his farming equipment with a TV remote. After overhearing a conversation from one time horse owner Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), she decides to get the town's folk together and breed her own unlikely race horse; Dream Alliance. A remarkable success, the horse unites the town, but an injury throws the syndicate into disarray, asking the question of whether Dream Alliance will ever race again, and indeed what the point of getting into the sport in the first place was.
Dream Horse, directed by Euros Lyn who is predominantly known for his television work, is the sort of low budget film that you might have expected off the cover to come out of Australia. Locations are low rent, green screen work is minimal and when used largely ineffective, and the colouring and overall ambience of the piece is dreary to say the least. The script itself isn’t anything particularly special - fairly standard horse racing (or indeed anything sort of rags to riches, rise-fall-rise) plot.
Indeed, one’s first thought coming out of the cinema is just how uninteresting and boring this film COULD have been.
It’s a miracle, then, that the thought immediately after that is that whatever this film is, it isn’t to be relegated to the scrap heap quite so easily. And around about 100% of that is down to Toni Collette.
Collette brings a stunning level of nuance, gravitas and agency to a character who on the page must have read as relatively two-dimensional. She is backed up ably by the supporting cast of course, in particular Vokes and Lewis who both have quite subtle and nuanced two-handers with her at different points, but she is leagues ahead of anyone else in this piece. Collette's depiction brings life to this film, infusing it with a sense of purpose, glossing over the more mediocre beats and hamfisted lines. Hell, she even excels at pretending to cheer for a fake horse in front of what is very obviously a green screen. It’s a mammoth achievement, but her presence (a) asserts her talents once again on the world stage and (b) makes what otherwise would have been an uninspired story we’ve seen before not just watchable, but enjoyable.
