Always engrossing yet never laboriously abstract, Strawberry Mansion creates a delectable realm of reverie that’s easy to get lost in-though it can also feel tensely labyrinthine at times. In fact, the auditor is so smitten that he hardly realizes the conspiracy he’s unwittingly landed himself within, spending all day in a clunky headset instead of piecing together the significance of how advertising and unpaid taxes converge.

While he’s officially meant to be viewing these in order to collect data, he begins to fall in love with the younger version of Bella (Grace Glowicki) that serves as her constant avatar in dreamland. An eccentric older woman named Bella (Penny Fuller) answers the door, and says she’ll only allow the tax man inside if he complies with her code: “To enter, you must lick the ice cream cone.” A bite-sized scoop of strawberry ice cream sits atop a small sugar cone-and though he’s reluctant at first, James eventually relents and licks the ice cream cone, a decision which effectively begins his odyssey of wading through thousands of VHS tapes containing Bella’s dreams.

When he arrives at a sprawling Victorian abode with a magenta exterior, he believes he’s simply making a routine house call to address unpaid back taxes. Set in the not-so-distant future, Strawberry Mansion follows James Preble (Audley), an auditor who works for a governmental agency that regulates “dream taxes,” a result of ads being projected into our most intimate mental moments. This ensures that none of the audience falls into their own movie-induced slumber while also serving as a boon to the project’s ethos-one that desperately urges us to pay close attention to the details and potential meanings of our dreams, as they might just be the very key to our survival. Not only is Strawberry Mansion a genuine feast for the eyes, but its plot is far more cohesive and calculated than most dream-like narratives care to strive for. Co-directed by Albert Bimey and Kentucker Audley (who also stars), the film is an exercise in creating a dreamscape by way of capturing texture-a venture that renders enthralling, gorgeous and unsettling images as a result. The intangible logic of our subconscious minds is what fuels Strawberry Mansion, a dazed and dreamy jaunt through nostalgic reverie and existential anxieties. Here are the 15 best sci-fi movies of 2022: Classic concepts, modernized or bastardized-always in ways that made us laugh, cry or, especially, think. In these small-scale films, you can find the auditors of dreams, time travelers who can only see two minutes into the future/past, musical masterminds plotting radical techno-revolutions, and clones that steal your shitty life. Another was a creature feature dense with references to lights and cameras-action! As these movies got big and added in horror, comedy, action and melodrama, it was in the smaller entries where sci-fi enthusiasts could find solace in esotericism (a bastion of sci-fi nerdiness if ever there was one). Another did something similar…only with Beavis and Butt-Head. One of the year’s biggest movies was an indie featuring a universe with talking rocks. But apart from James Cameron’s technological feat of production and product, science fiction was back on the multiverse beat. It’s like how we invented countless things just trying to get to the Moon. Not only is Avatar: The Way of Water sci-fi, its very creation seems like sci-fi. The best sci-fi movies of 2022 had a lot to live up to this year.

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