The mansion in this dream-tax sci-fi is a rotting dollhouse

Strawberry Mansion was made in 2019 by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, and it is a science fiction film whose title house is an old dollhouse Birney bought years earlier and let rot. The crew repainted it, added to it, and filmed it under the same light as the actors. Most of the effects were built by hand too.

The story is set in 2035, when dreams are recorded and taxed. Audley plays James Preble, an auditor sent to go through the dreams of an elderly artist, Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), which are stored on VHS tapes. Preble becomes infatuated with her younger self, Bella (Grace Glowicki), and notices ads being inserted into people's dreams, his own included.

How did the film get made?

In 2012, Birney emailed Audley a script and asked if he would act in it. The film premiered at Sundance in 2021, in the Next section, nine years after that email.

Audley says they shot over September and December of 2019, in 14 hour days around their day jobs. Birney has said of making it: "For years I had no idea how we were going to do this." The directors gave no budget figure.

What are the creatures made of?

The creature suits are unspooled VHS tape, glued strip by strip onto clothing. The first suit used tape from a Seinfeld video. The plan was for 50 to 100 of them in the final shot, and it was cut to a single creature.

Lawrence Becker animated a stop-motion caterpillar from a pipe cleaner and cotton balls. Audley says the super-wide desert shots are stock footage. The machine Preble uses to audit dreams is built from old top-loading VCRs.

Why does it look the way it does?

Most of the film was shot digitally with vintage lenses. The filmmakers then transferred the whole thing to 16mm film, which gave the handmade effects one grainy texture. Dan Deacon's score uses retro synths, and the soundtrack carries vinyl hisses and pops.

Music Box Films opened it in US theaters in February 2022. It made about $97,000 at the box office.

Strawberry Mansion is for viewers who want to see what a film looks like when its effects are built with glue, tape and a dollhouse instead of CGI.

Sci-Fi