Many stories rely on natural elements to reinforce their message. Wind, wood, memory, and silence shape Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, and the new film adaptation embraces all of it. The movie, based on the 2011 novella, revisits the life of an ordinary man marked by extraordinary loss, living in a country that modernized far too quickly for someone like him to keep up. The production, now streaming on Netflix, understands this deeply — and perhaps that’s why it becomes, above all, a film about sensations.

Robert Grainier is no hero. He is a laborer in the early 20th century, an introverted, almost rugged man shaped by hard physical work and by a world that never asked him for gentleness. Joel Edgerton, who excels at embodying silence like few others, delivers one of his strongest performances here: everything is in the eyes, in the breath, in the way he occupies space as if carrying an unbearable weight he can’t set down.

Grainier’s life remains simple until a devastating wildfire consumes the region where he lives, killing his wife, Gladys, and their young daughter. His grief does not erupt — it settles. He becomes a hermit, trapped among memories, rumors, myths, and the relentless advance of the railroads cutting through the landscape like scars. He holds on to the hope of reunion until his final breath, a longing we know will never be fulfilled, but that we, like him and for him, end up yearning for all the same.

Felicity Jones appears less than we might wish, but her presence permeates the entire film. There’s a rare precision in her work: sweetness without sentimentality, empathy without naïveté. It’s exactly the kind of performance that makes the character’s absence weigh heavily in every scene that follows. It’s striking how luminous she makes Gladys, even when the film turns her into a ghost.

The cinematography is breathtaking. Wide-open landscapes, rivers that seem ancient enough to have witnessed every loss, forests that hold more silence than answers. This is the kind of film in which nature is not a backdrop — it is a character, a consciousness, a witness.

And then comes the score. Bryce Dessner, from The National, continues his transition into film composing with an almost spiritual delicacy. Some notes feel like longing; some chords sound like fractured memories. And the final choice — a song performed by Nick Cave — is the exact, devastating stroke: a farewell that seals everything the film wants to say about pain, persistence, and survival.

Perhaps the most curious — and ambitious — element of the adaptation is the voice-over, lifted directly from Denis Johnson’s text. Critics are divided, and understandably so. Much like Andrew Dominik in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence, the film embraces a literary, almost confessional narration that guides the viewer through the protagonist’s most intimate thoughts.

Does it work? Partially. The narration leads us into emotional territory that images alone might struggle to express, but it also limits us. It occupies spaces that could have been ours — of imagination, projection, interpretation. It’s as if the film takes our hand but pulls away some of the freedom to wander.

Critics have responded to this with interest. Many praise the refusal to “translate” the novella into a more conventional Netflix-friendly structure. Others argue that the narration asserts itself too heavily. The general consensus, however, points in the same direction: this is a film fundamentally different from what one expects inside the platform’s catalog.

No accelerated pacing, no thriller architecture, no easy melodrama. It is contemplative, intimate, almost meditative — a rare case of cinema that demands surrender, not quick attention.

And, in the end, Train Dreams remains faithful to what it always was: a reflection on strange human resilience. On continuing to live despite everything — and sometimes because of everything. A microscopic epic about obsession, loss, and the kind of solitude that becomes home when nothing else is left.

There is something profoundly ironic — and absolutely perfect — about the title Train Dreams. It is not just a literal reference to Grainier’s work, a man who spent his life beside the tracks, building the progress of a country that never truly saw him. “Train dreams” are the dreams that pass too quickly, like railcars you try to follow with your eyes but can never catch. They are memories that quiver, illusions that blur into grief, fantasies that surface in the mountain silence as the rest of the world moves on without you. Grainier doesn’t dream of trains; he dreams like them — in motion, yet condemned to remain in the same place. The title describes this contradiction: a man stuck in a life that keeps sliding past him, always distant, always out of reach.