Traindreams (2025): A Journey Through Memory, Loss, and the American Soul

There are films that tell stories, and then there are films that drift like recollections—fragmented, luminous, half-remembered. Traindreams, adapted from Denis Johnson’s spare and haunting novella, belongs to the latter kind. Directed by Chloé Zhao, whose meditative gaze captures both the beauty and loneliness of human existence, this 2025 adaptation unfolds less as a plot-driven narrative and more as a moving elegy for a man’s life and, through him, for a vanishing America. It is a story of love and solitude, wilderness and industry, the passage of time and the echoes of what was once called hope.

The Life Between Departures

The film traces the life of Robert Grainier (Casey Affleck), a railroad worker at the dawn of the 20th century. His is an unremarkable life made transcendent by quiet resilience and profound sorrow. Zhao’s adaptation retains Johnson’s elliptical storytelling—years slip by in a breath, landscapes shift from blinding daylight to twilight blue, and Grainier remains both witness and traveler through it all.

From his youthful labor on the railroads carving paths through Idaho’s wild valleys to his middle years marked by an unspeakable loss, Grainier’s story mirrors the pulse of a changing nation. Industrialization thunders through forests, cutting through silence with the scream of locomotive whistles. Yet, amid progress, Zhao places Grainier as an almost ghostly figure—rooted to the earth, standing at tracks that carry others forward while he remains behind, enveloped in memory.

The Wound of Isolation

Affleck delivers perhaps his most restrained performance to date, rendering Grainier’s grief and solitude in gestures more than words. His marriage to Gladys (Ruth Negga) is brief but radiant—moments of domestic tenderness, playful exchanges by the riverbank—before fire and fate rewrite his world. When tragedy strikes, Zhao eschews melodrama for silence and distance. The camera lingers on smoke rising into a violet dusk, on the empty spaces that once held laughter. What remains is the ache of a man suspended between what he remembers and what he cannot bear to recall.

Isolation becomes both punishment and sanctuary. Grainier retreats deeper into the woods, building a cabin and a life pared down to essentials. Over time, he becomes part of the landscape: a witness to wolves, storms, and stars. Through this retreat, Zhao’s filmmaking finds poetry in the elemental—rain on tin, ember glow on skin, the slow exhale of wind. The film does not rush to console him; instead, it honors his endurance, his quiet persistence in an indifferent world.

America as Dream and Mirage

What gives Traindreams its profound resonance is its double vision—both personal and historical. Zhao frames Grainier’s experiences against the unstoppable march of progress: the arrival of airplanes, automobiles, and the electric light. Yet this forward motion feels hollow, almost spectral, compared to the soulful simplicity of human survival. The railroads that once symbolized destiny now appear as arteries of displacement, pulling people away from the intimacy of land and community.

Through Zhao’s lens, America becomes both dream and mirage. The film’s vast panoramic shots—sunsets bleeding into mountain ranges, locomotives slicing across silver plains—are undercut by an awareness that such beauty cannot be possessed or preserved. In its quietest moments, the film feels like a prayer for everything we have lost to modernity: the stillness of wild places, the intimacy of hand-built dwellings, the humility of lives lived close to the soil.

Redemption in Silence

And yet, Traindreams is not a story of defeat. It finds redemption not in noise or revelation but in stillness. In the final act, when Grainier encounters a feral child and a dreamlike vision of flight, Zhao blurs the lines between reality and divine visitation. The moment feels both surreal and sacred, suggesting that the boundaries between life and afterlife, between grief and grace, are softer than they seem.

By the film’s end, what remains is a sense of acceptance—the fragile peace that comes from looking back without bitterness. Grainier’s life, though marked by loss, transcends tragedy. It becomes a vessel for remembering the quiet souls who built, toiled, and loved along the edges of history, their stories carried forward like the echo of a whistle across the night.

A Film for the Quiet Heart

Traindreams may frustrate those seeking narrative urgency or resolution. But for viewers who are willing to dwell in its silences, it offers something rare: an encounter with stillness, with mortality, and with the enduring spirit of the American frontier. Zhao and her cinematographer craft each frame as though it were an old photograph—sepia-toned, fragile, but infinite in feeling.

In the end, Traindreams (2025) is less a film than a spiritual experience. It invites reflection on what progress costs, how memory endures, and what it means to live a life both ordinary and sacred. Much like Johnson’s novella, Zhao’s adaptation remains a meditation on the soul’s long journey—by train, by foot, and finally, by dream.