One of the crown jewels of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Train Dreams has found itself in the race for Best Picture at the Oscars alongside titles like One Battle After Another, Sinners, Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme, Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Frankenstein, and F1. A very diverse pool of films, each of them being unique in its own way, and among them is Train Dreams, with an identity that quietly makes its case for the top honor.

Train Dreams might just be the ultimate Best Picture archetype, and there are compelling arguments that can be made in favor of this claim.

The beauty of Train Dreams lies in its simple premise: an ordinary story of an ordinary man, but with extraordinary emotional depth. Set in the early 1900s, when America was going through a rapid transformation, and railroads were being built at a staggering pace to facilitate this change. The story follows the life of Robert Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton, who is a logger without any kith and kin.

He falls in love with Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones), and they start a life together. But one day everything falls apart, and he is left to pick up the pieces. Director Clint Bentley brilliantly brings forth the natural charm and stunning beauty of early twentieth-century Northwest America. The depiction of the day-to-day life of loggers in that era and their connection to the forest that provides them with a livelihood.

The sequences where we get to see Robert and Gladys spend whatever time they have together between the logging season are mesmerising enough make anyone want to run to the mountains and start a family in a secluded cabin.

But the heaviest part of the story is the grief that comes after losing his family to a forest fire, and Edgerton does not just show us pain - he embodies it. The journey to coming to terms with his loss is why the story is so special. Edgerton is subtle and natural in his portrayal, which reels one into his excruciatingly painful journey, giving all the reasons why the Academy seems to have fallen in love with this movie. 

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The movie also has much more going for it, of which its roots and execution might have really fit with the Academy's choice of the best picture.

Clint Bentley has played an important part in adapting Denis Johnson's 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist novella into a poignant and hard-hitting story of a man living the life of a hermit in the mountains of Idaho. Johnson’s literary material that stitched love, labor, and loss together in a painstakingly beautiful story received a whole new life with Bentley’s direction.

With meditative precision and visual poetry, Bentley, who directed from a script he co-wrote with his longtime colleague Greg Kwedar, depicts sorrow and change. They take the audience into a simple story, but as it progresses, it becomes a broad analysis of memory, death, and the inner turmoil without them even knowing. And that is the beauty of exceptional writing, something that will definitely be appreciated by the Academy voters.

The movie is the dark horse in this race to the top, and might just be the one to turn the tables with its silent appeal and favorable word of mouth. The fate of this movie at the Oscars is still uncertain, but the Train Dreams director, Clint Bentley, has made sure that it becomes a special movie for the audience, regardless of the result.  

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What do you think of the chances of Train Dreams at the Oscars? Share your thoughts in the comments.