Train Dreams had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2025, and was released in select cinemas in the United States on November 7, 2025, before its streaming debut by Netflix on November 21, 2025. The film received critical acclaim, with praise going to Bentley's direction and Edgerton's performance. Among its accolades, the film was named as one of the top ten films of 2025 by the National Board of Review.
Plot
The film recounts the 80 years of the life of Robert Grainier (Edgerton) around Bonners Ferry, Idaho.[2] Arriving in the area on the Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child, Robert drops out of school and spends his younger years without direction or purpose, until he meets Gladys Olding. They marry, build a log cabin along the Moyie River, and have a daughter, Kate.
He takes to railroad construction for the Spokane International Railway, but witnesses a Chinese worker thrown off a bridge by a group of white workers for unclear reasons, and he is continually haunted by visions of the man and dreams of him being struck by a train. Robert later takes up seasonal logging work, but it takes him away from Gladys and Kate for long periods of time. He meets many men who leave impressions on him, but he also witnesses more tragedies along the way. One worker is killed by a vigilante avenging the murder of his brother; several other workers are killed by a falling tree, their graves marked by a pair of boots nailed to a tree. Robert grows close to a fellow logger, Arn Peeples, who is killed by a falling branch.
Robert tries to take up work closer to home but struggles in the post-World War I economy. He and Gladys decide to farm and build a lumber mill so he can stop logging, but Robert returns from his final season of logging to discover the cabin destroyed in a wildfire, with Gladys and Kate missing. A despondent Robert is brought company by his friend, Ignatius Jack, and he rebuilds the cabin. As Robert returns to logging, he finds himself out of place amid new technology and younger, rougher men, and decides to stop.
Taking a job as a carriage driver for townspeople, he meets Claire Thompson of the United States Forest Service who is in town to conduct a survey, who encourages him. Robert continually walks through the woods, believing he can feel the spirits of his wife and daughter sometimes, and hopes not to drive them away. One night, he believes he sees an injured Kate apparently return to the cabin and he tends to her wounds, but after a night of dreams he awakens to no sign she was ever there. He determines to continue living in the cabin in case she ever returns. Years go by, and the world changes around an aging and weathered Robert, who rides the Great Northern into Spokane, witnessing John Glenn's flight into space on a television.
The film ends on a spring day when Robert decides to fly in a biplane. As the plane loops and circles in the air, sights and sounds of people and places throughout his life pass through his mind. The narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in the cabin in November of 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."
Train Dreams has been compared to the work of Terrence Malick, and Bentley has cited Malick as an influence, describing him as "one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever lived."
He changed the language of cinema. He created a new form, like one of those rare filmmakers that turned the medium in a new direction. There's not many of them.
So, yeah, I'm a big fan. Trying to do my own thing, but if I'm mentioned in the same sentence as him, I'm very honored.[3]
Although Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso considered shooting on film, the production’s 29-day schedule made it impractical; as a result, it was shot digitally.[3]
Bentley has said that only a limited number of real trees were felled during production; scenes depicting characters cutting into a tree were performed using an artificial prop constructed from wood and fiberglass, with visual effects applied to extend the trunk and canopy to resemble a full-sized tree.[3]
Will Patton provided the voiceover for the film. He had also previously narrated the audiobook of Denis Johnson’s novella.[9]
The Nick Cave song "Train Dreams", recorded for the film, was not included in the version shown at the Sundance Film Festival; it was added in subsequent releases.[10]
Release
Train Dreams premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2025.[11][12] Shortly after, Netflix acquired distribution rights to the film.[13] The film was released in select theaters in the United States on November 7, 2025, before being made available for streaming on Netflix globally on November 21.[14][15]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 188 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "A gorgeous meditation on America, ably shouldered by one of Joel Edgerton's very best performances, Train Dreams takes on mythic proportions while maintaining an intimate emotional delicacy."[17]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 88 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[18]
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