Critics reviews

Strawberry Mansion, with its shadowy corporations, VHS tapes, demons, and impossible recursive connections between present and past, weirdly covers ground similar to that of the recent Netflix horror series Archive 81... Except that Strawberry Mansion doesn’t view the repressed material of the mind (or of the video tape) with trepidation, but rather with a sense of open, playful delight.

Drenched to its rococo core with complex and increasingly frenzied imagery, the film’s fantastic conceit will either irk or charm... Strawberry Mansion is a film to admire not just for its psychedelic aesthetic delirium, but also for its pure moxie, its gleeful embrace of the very idea of filmmaking itself, and the socialist thematic core that lies at its unabashed romantic heart.

It’s easy to mistake Strawberry Mansion for a simple parable about advertising and the federal government. But ultimately, it’s a strange film about art and its conditions.

Though frustrating, Audley and Birney’s vision is ultimately still worth experiencing, even if they’ve muddled it with an ill-considered screenplay.

The winsome visuals alone are enough for me to recommend "Strawberry Mansion." Yet within this enchanting aesthetic, Audley and Birney craft a compelling story that's mind-bending and heartwarming.

Within its slight, rickety framework, however, “Strawberry Mansion” attempts to do rather a lot, shifting from prankish surrealist farce to fey, across-time love story, sometimes giving way to an anti-capitalist satire directed very much at the present moment.

Beneath the layers of fuzzy frequencies, feverish absurdism, and kaleidoscopic tints lives an inconspicuously poignant movie about existentialist dread, the very human need to reduce the noise, and the genuine longing for connection in a chaotic, jumbled up world.

If “Strawberry Mansion” never fully shakes the impression of a half-formed idea, that itself reflects the unconscious state where it spends most of its 90 spellbinding minutes.

At its heart, Strawberry Mansion is an intentionally light respite from the painful times that we’re living in right now... It’s a candy-colored storybook that wants nothing more than to put you at ease.

Strawberry Mansion is a romantically inclined nightmare, and one whose imagery and narrative palette seem designed to seep into the subconscious.