If you stand close enough to a passing train, the wind can knock the breath out of you. The old-timers said it could steal your memory too, that a fast-moving locomotive drags a piece of time behind it, sweeping away whatever isn’t bolted down in your heart. Watching Train Dreams feels a bit like that old superstition: as if the film slips past you with such force and sorrow and beauty that you look up at the end unsure how much of your own life it has carried off.ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEOClint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella is not an attempt to resurrect the frontier romance we’ve seen a hundred times. Instead, it examines the lives of the men who laid the tracks, felled the forests, and unknowingly built the country that would one day grow too loud for people like them. Bentley approaches history through the smallest aperture, a single man, a logger named Robert Grainier, and somehow the world feels bigger for it.The epic of an unremarkable manJoel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a railroad labourer whose life stretches across the shifting tides of the early twentieth century. Edgerton is an actor who excels in interiority, small gestures, half-thought glances, and Train Dreams uses those qualities beautifully. Grainier is a man whose life is shaped more by circumstance than conviction, by the world’s changes rather than any grand ambitions of his own. Yet Edgerton gives him dignity, a quiet resilience, a sensitivity that never has to announce itself.The plot is simple, almost deceptively so. Grainier works, he loves, he suffers loss, he grows old. But Bentley structures the film less as a narrative and more as a collage of moments, some luminous, others tragic, all connected by the hum of progress cutting through the untouched wilderness.Landscapes as languageThe cinematography deserves its own paragraph, several, really. Shot with an eye that clearly reveres Terrence Malick’s framing. One of the film’s most striking achievements is the way it allows nature to dwarf everything else. The cinematography leans heavily on top-angle shots that make the land look ancient and untamed, while Grainier moves like a brief, almost accidental presence upon it. Low-angle shots through dense pine branches catch the sun in broken shards, creating the sensation that the earth is older and wiser than any character who walks on it. A still from Netflix’s Train Dreams starring Joel EdgertonIn many frames, Grainier is pushed to the corner or reduced to a tiny dot in the distance, as though the film is reminding us that humans were not the centre of this world, they were simply passing through it. Forests tower over him. Skies swallow him. Rivers roar without noticing him. It’s a bold choice: many films want their characters to dominate the frame; Train Dreams insists the opposite.The result is strangely hypnotic. You are not watching a man move through nature — you’re watching nature move around him.Story continues below this adBeauty and brutality of changeAnother striking aspect of Train Dreams is how it blends the intimacy of Grainier’s life with the sweeping historical changes of early 20th-century America. The rise of the railroad, the expansion into the Northwest wilderness, the transient workers carving a path through forests – the film captures all of this without ever breaking its intimate focus on one man.Yet this is not nostalgia. Bentley resists romanticising the era; he shows the back-breaking labour, the unpredictability of nature, the lives erased by economic and environmental forces. When a massive wildfire becomes a pivotal moment, it’s staged not as spectacle but as a terrifying inevitability. You feel how small humans are in the face of such forces, how Grainier’s life, and all lives like his, are shaped by things beyond their control.Felicity Jones, as Gladys, appears briefly but imprints herself deeply on the film’s emotional geography. Her scenes with Edgerton have a gentleness that the harsh, muscular world of logging rarely allows. When tragedy arrives, and it arrives in a way that alters the entire trajectory of Grainier’s life, Bentley refuses melodrama. The grief isn’t broadcast; it’s absorbed. A still from Netflix’s Train DreamsTrain Dreams makes you think about the people you love – not in a sentimental way, but with a deeper awareness that time doesn’t pause for any of us. The life Grainier loses is built of moments most of us overlook. Watching him outlive the world he once knew makes you want to hold your people close, to appreciate the time you have with them before the world changes around you too.Story continues below this adAlso Read | All Her Fault review: Sarah Snook leads a devastating thriller about the terrifying fragility of parenthoodTrain Dreams trailer:And in a way, it mirrors something players felt in Red Dead Redemption 2 – that sudden, dawning understanding that loneliness is a frontier nobody escapes, and that the families we make, even briefly, are the only thing that keeps the wilderness from swallowing us whole. Both the game and the film leave you with the same quiet truth: love won’t save you from the inevitability of solitude, but it gives the journey meaning while it lasts.Train DreamsTrain Dreams Cast – Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon, William H. MacyTrain Dreams Director – Clint BentleyTrain Dreams Rating – 4/5