Attempting to simply describe “Strawberry Mansion” using a quick sentence does the film an injustice. Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have crafted a film that is strange, funny, scary, and smart. It’s an experience that you have to enjoy for yourself, perhaps with the assistance of some recreational goodies.
With “Strawberry Mansion” arriving in theaters this week, we’re thrilled to give our readers an exclusive look at a clip from the film, which sorta sums up all you need to know about the film in a quick bit. “Strawberry Mansion” takes place in 2035 and follows the journey of an auditor in a world where dreams are no longer our own. It’s a wild story with crazy visuals that accentuate the unconventional story.
In our review of the film from last year’s Sundance, we said, “Their candy-color-coated film, ‘Strawberry Mansion,’ is ridiculous and whimsical, with the cruddy analog, lo-fi aesthetics of a cult weirdo classic in the making, but also jam-packed with a lot of heady ideas about capitalism, exploitation, invasive surveillance statehood, and the encroaching colonization of the mind with subconscious commercials.”
“Strawberry Mansion” opens in select theaters on February 18 before arriving on VOD on February 25. You can watch the exclusive clip below.
Here’s the synopsis:
In 2035, our dreams are no longer our own–they’re infused with product placement and auditors assess unpaid taxes on our most private reveries. Beleaguered taxman James Preble (Kentucker Audley) arrives at a run-down house in the countryside for a routine audit and encounters Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller), a lifelong dreamer who remains resolutely analog, circumventing the surveillance state with VHS tapes and homemade headgear. As Preble works his way through Bella’s archive of the unconscious, he begins to fall in love with visions of her younger self (Grace Glowicki). But all is not well in dreamland as dangerous family secrets and a rogue’s gallery of blue demons and fried chicken pitchmen threaten to set the lovers’ paradise ablaze. Can Preble and Bella escape from the modern, monetized dreamscape and find refuge in Strawberry Mansion?
