Cassandra's Dream

Cassandra’s Dream

Directed by Woody Allen (R)

Two working-class brothers struggling for a better life agree to commit a murder.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

??

Cassandra’s Dream leaves you with the sense that Woody Allen has made this movie before, said Scott Tobias in The Onion. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play working-class English brothers looking for “a shortcut to the good life.” They dream big but have little: McGregor longs to invest in real estate yet lacks the capital. Farrell, a mechanic with a taste for gambling and booze, just wants to set his life straight. Financial relief comes in the form of Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), a plastic surgeon who promises to help if they agree to take out the whistle-blower who’s threatening to ruin his career. Allen steals a plot from his own Crimes and Misdemeanors, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. In fact, it’s the same one he stole for his recent Match Point: Ordinary people are compelled to commit a murder. But the brilliantly played Match Point “wove avarice, duplicity, and fatal attraction into a caper worthy of Tom Ripley,” while Cassandra’s Dream works from a narrative too straight to cause any palpable tension. Nevertheless, the murder and the steps leading up to it are “nerve-racking and appropriately creepy,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. “In his Raskolnikov mood” the director shows us, with Farrell, a new kind of Allen character: a decent guy with a guilty conscience. Whereas in the past Allen usually let his criminals off, Cassandra’s Dream makes them own up to their crimes.