‘Dreams’ Trailer: Jessica Chastain’s Affair with an Illegal Immigrant Implodes in Michel Franco’s Dangerous Romance

Greenwich Entertainment releases the "New Order" and "Memory" director's San Francisco-shot thriller in February.

Jessica Chastain‘s Apple TV series “The Savant” may be on hold, but her latest movie, out in February, is explosive enough to cause a new controversy on its own.

Comfort-cinema-opposed Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco brushed against hope and tenderness with his 2023 dementia-added love story “Memory,” but he’s back in a pissed-off minor key over the state of the world — and especially the toxic codependence between the U.S. and his home country — in “Dreams.”

Remember the strikes of 2023? How quaint. Back then, Franco shot his ninth feature on location in the San Francisco Bay Area, courtesy of an interim waiver, and with “Memory” star Jessica Chastain, newcomer Isaac Hernández, and Rupert Friend in the cast. It went on to premiere at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, unfortunately winning no awards from Todd Haynes’ jury, and finally secured distribution from Greenwich Entertainment earlier this year. Watch the trailer below.

In “Dreams,” Chastain plays a wealthy San Francisco arts patron whose life has been coddled and conflict-free, thanks to her powerful father. With a special interest in the ballet, she falls for a much-younger rising dancer (Hernández) while on a “business” trip to Mexico City, and he winds up illegally crossing the border through terrible circumstances to get to her. What could go wrong? It’s an erotic, disturbing romance — in other words, career-characteristic work from the director of sibling incest thriller “Daniel and Ana.”

As I wrote in my review out of Berlin, this film is “an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns… There’s not a lot of hope in ‘Dreams,’ and for that, it’s a movie of our times and one that maybe can only exist because of them. It’s about how the falsity of the American dream (a dream that is immigrants, after all) propels Mexican people to make the illegal dangerous crossing at all, and about how the U.S. and Mexico need each other in all ways.”

I also spoke to Franco and Chastain out of that festival, where Franco said, “I don’t need to be liked as a filmmaker, for people to think, ‘Oh, he’s a good person.’ I have no trouble about that. I am more interested in representing life. What’s going on between the two countries and what Mexicans and immigrants are living in the States on a daily basis is much more dramatic than even what we portrayed [in ‘Dreams’]. So I wasn’t shy about that. The main thing is it’s true love. That’s what makes it work, that they are in love, and that’s why it’s tragic.”

The movie arrives in theaters on February 27, 2026. Watch the trailer below.