When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on Sunday, 7 June 2026, I promised to return and add a survey of the film’s reviews published after the opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 10th. I got distracted, but now I've typed up the review round-up. It came out longer than I anticipated, so I decided to post it as a separate piece.
[I strongly suggest, however, that readers who haven’t seen the first report on the film go back and read it before trying to make sense of the reviews. I explained and defined a lot in the original post that I haven’t duplicated below.]
The Tech
In his review of Dreams of Violets in Variety (“‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? AshKoosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still aStartling Portent of the Future”), Owen Gleiberman stated:
[T]hose of us at the premiere were really watching—and evaluating—two films at once. The first is a drama, set in Tehran . . . . But the other movie, which is far more interesting and significant, is the one that demonstrates, simply by virtue of its existence, what some of the possibilities might be for the use of AI within the world of feature filmmaking.
I also see the criticism of Dreams of Violets as the evaluation of two aspects of the film: the AI technology in all its implications, including its ethical considerations, and the cinematic or artistic assessment—how good a movie it is, irrespective of how it was made.
I think I covered the ethical debate over AI filmmaking in the original post, and I don’t think seeing the movie has changed people’s minds about where they stand in that debate. So, let’s see what reviewers said about the effectiveness or lack thereof of the technology.
In “Iran’s Political Violence In A.I.-Generated Film” (online: “The Violence in Iran Was Real. The Film Showing It Was A.I.”), Malia Mendez and Matt Stevens reported in the New York Times that among viewers, “Some felt it was evident that the footage had been generated by A.I. and not filmed, while others said they were shocked by how real the people looked.”
“Andres Ramirez, a filmmaker [Mexican; b. 1996; independent filmmaker],” from whom they quoted, “was critical, calling some scenes ‘cartoonish’ and akin to ‘early PlayStation 2 graphics.’ The characters’ emotional reactions, he added, did not always look genuine.”
The filmmaker added “that atrocities depicted by A.I. just do not have the same impact as ‘the real thing,’ and continued, ‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”
In the Financial Times (“AI-generated film about Iran protests turns tragedy into slop”), Nicolas Rapold expressed the opinion that “the movie . . . arrives with the growing pains of AI evident in every aspect—less proof of concept than cautionary tale.”
Observes Rapold, “technically [the movie is] a mess. The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions. They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited. In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled . . . .” He adds, “AI’s tendency to homogenise [sic] reality keeps undermining any attempts to make the portrayal of resistance feel grounded.”
In conclusion, Rapold asserts, “Dreams of Violets is better described as a vibe—a prolonged evocation of concussed trauma—rather than a fully realised [sic] movie. AI cinema still awaits its Lumière brothers.”
[The most significant accomplishment of the Lumière brothers (Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), French manufacturers of photography equipment, was the invention of the Cinématographe (1895), an all-in-one device capable of capturing, printing, and projecting motion pictures. This breakthrough paved the way for the birth of cinema as a mass medium and entertainment industry.]
Gleiberman, in his Variety notice, first asks “an aesthetic question: Is ‘Dreams of Violets’ a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI? The strange answer to that is yes, but not really.” (I’ll get to his “aesthetic” answer in a bit.)
If you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it’s horrifying, but the effect is 100 times less powerful in a film that simply looks like a documentary, since we know, in our gut, that we’re not watching reality. That’s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we’re watching. But Ash Koosha hasn’t scripted “Dreams of Violets” that way. He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an “existential” drama that’s all “authentic” but abstract moments: the vérité political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art. It’s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.
[I was unfamiliar with the expression “uncanny valley” (or “uncanny valley effect”) so, for others in the same boat, according to Wiktionary, it means:
Digital or ambiguous physical spaces that create a sense of unease or eeriness due to deviations from familiar patterns that challenge perception and categorization, leading to discomfort. (e.g., liminal spaces, haunted houses, the Backrooms, etc.).
[The phrase is a literal translation of a Japanese expression first used in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1927-2025) from his essay entitled “Bukimi No Tani” (“The Uncanny Valley”). The terms both come up often in reviews of Dreams of Violets.]
“But if ‘Dreams of Violets,’ as a movie, is mostly a bust,” concludes Gleibman, “as an AI showreel it’s something more.” He elucidates:
[W]hat I saw in “Dreams of Violence” looked plenty textured and realistic. Does this mean that AI can “make a movie”? No. But it does mean that AI can give you scenes of roiling tumultuous Civil War set in the hurly-burly of Tehran at sunset, with soldiers roaming the streets and forcing citizens into vans as others scurry out of the way, and it can make you believe your eyes.
Then, his clincher:
And here’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. . . . [T]he most powerful message to emerge from “Dreams of Violets” isn’t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors. It’s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.
In “‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: An AI-Generated Movie Is Worrisome for All the Right Reasons” on The Wrap, Matthew Creith observes, “Memories blur together, and faces appear and quickly vanish like vignettes without a motive. Whether intentional or not, the dreamlike nature of AI-generated moving imagery often mirrors emotional reality rather than depicting actual emotions through acting or historical reenactments.”
The Wrap reviewer continues:
The limitations of current technology are impossible to ignore on the artificial intelligence front. Characters frequently move with an unnatural stiffness while [Ash] Koosha lingers on close-ups of eyelashes and tears to signify the detail that AI is supposed to be good at creating. Facial expressions often feel generic rather than lived-in, and frequent quick cuts are distracting at best. The dialogue, much of it generated from Koosha’s own vocal performances and modified through common AI tools, can sound muddy and disconnected from the images on screen.
When a film like this, despite its short runtime, is asking viewers to engage with real human suffering, that emotional disconnect can be difficult to overcome.
Describing what I understand as the “uncanny valley effect,” Creith reports:
The faces in “Dreams of Violets” often feel ghostly, almost suspended between existence and disappearance. The streets of Tehran seem simultaneously real and imagined, sort of like Spike Jonze’s [b. 1969] “Her” [Warner Bros., 2013] without the authenticity of its central characters. Rather than recreating reality with documentary precision, the film exists in a liminal space between memory and testimony.
In The Indypendent [sic] (“The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical”), a progressive newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, that covers local, national and international news; food; cinema; and culture, John Teufel complained that
at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI—which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!). Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles. More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen. When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.
[Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He’s best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication. His concept of hyperreality is complex and hard to explain in a few words, so I suggest readers who want to unpack this comment look it up for themselves and try to sort it out. The simple definition is that Baudrillardian hyperreality is a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so seamlessly that we can no longer tell the difference. In this state, simulations, images, and media models replace the original reality, becoming “more real than real.”
[As for “cash-grab,” Teufel reports later in his column, “[Ash] Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people.” He lists some of Koosha’s tech holdings to suggest that the film’s creator is promoting his commercial enterprises to sell his services.]
The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again . . . . Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details. Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices—all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”
The Indypendent review-writer notes that the movie “is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game. A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand. A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out. Someone is shot—there is no bullet wound.” And so on.
The Art
The Times didn’t have much to say about the movie as a movie, but filmmaker Ramirez, while offering the opinion that “‘Dreams of Violets’ would be the most-talked-about movie of the festival,” mused, “‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”
FT’s Rapold found “The film’s very loose train of events returns to a few largely perfunctory characters—a doctor, a young pianist, a boy in a wheelchair watching from a window—while cycling through street scenes of security forces attacking protesters.” He added that the characters “move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.
“There’s also no substitute for good writing,” he admonished: “the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: ‘I don’t have anything but music.’”
“Koosha . . . appears to weave in actual audio recorded by protesters,” reports Rapold, which a “more documentary-oriented version of the movie might have emphasised [sic] . . ., so it’s maddening to hear sometimes barely audible snippets playing in the background of scenes.”
Rapold observed that “scenes are shoddily realized [sic]: a tone-deaf replay of the wheelchair-bound child’s parents dying in a car that flies off a cliff; a street scene involving a falling loaf of bread that wobbles in slow-motion.”
In his assessment of Dreams of Violets in Variety, Gleiberman said of the “first” movie, the “drama set in Tehran,” “I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective. In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.”
I gave the Variety reviewer’s technical response to his “aesthetic question above, but here’s the artistic response:
It’s actually the form of the movie that’s odd and off-putting: a barely scripted series of anecdotes, or mere moments, with little in the way of dramatic development. . . . But though the characters in “Dreams of Violets” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we’re barely given a context for what we’re seeing . . . .
“Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes,” writes Gleibman.
“Dreams of Violets” is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration. It’s set after the protests have already been contained (the country’s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression. Yes, we “get to know” half a dozen characters—a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others.
The justification Koosha gives for making Dreams of Violets with AI is that it couldn’t have been made any other way. Says Gleibman:
[B]ut effective art needs no justification. If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that Ash Koosha is exploiting the tragedy of his homeland to have the best possible excuse to craft an AI showreel.
This is Gleibman’s version of the “cash-grab” scenario, and makes the same point that The Indypendent’s Teufel made about Koosha’s AI businesses.
On The Wrap, Creith observes, “Rather than following a traditional narrative, the film drifts between interconnected stories . . . .”
The result often feels less like a conventional feature and more like fragments of memory stitched together. Scenes emerge and fade as characters cross paths, without necessarily creating a clear narrative throughline. At times, the experience is meant to feel like watching a documentary, though it evokes emotions akin to flipping through a collection of postcards from a traumatic moment in history.
. . . .
The strongest moments arrive when Koosha focuses less on spectacle and more on human experience, though these are few and far between and obviously not actually human.
The Wrap review-writer concludes:
As an experimental and timely film, “Dreams of Violets” is uneven, frequently frustrating, and undeniably flawed. As a snapshot of where both filmmaking and AI technology currently stand, it may ultimately prove more significant than the movie itself. What cannot be denied is that it leaves an impression, whether good or bad, and the movie deserves the conversation that will undoubtedly surround it.
At the very least, “Dreams of Violets” remains one of the most unusual and thought-provoking films playing at Tribeca this year.
At the start of his review, The Indypendent’s Teufel gives his mindset away: “Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets . . . I had one serious fear: what if it was good?” His fears don’t materialize: “As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.”
“I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time,” he confirms. (Do you suppose it’s relevant that Teufel is German for ‘devil’? Naah!)
The reviewer expands a little on his pronouncements:
If you are going to see Dreams of Violets—which you should not—I urge you to read up on these events [the January 2026 protests in Tehran] before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes. Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers. There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point). If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting. As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.
“The film entirely lacks narrative logic,” complains Teufel, “making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by. After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.” Adds the reviewer, “And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express [Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004].”
[Some critics panned The Polar Express’s character animation for dipping into the uncanny valley, because it seemed to falter in mimicking realistic facial expressions and emotions.]
“It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause,” Teufel concluded. “When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped. The vibe was funereal.”
[It seems to me, from reading these and other reviews, that the artistic weaknesses in Dreams of Violets are the fault of the fact that Ash Koosha isn’t either a screenwriter or a filmmaker. He’s essentially an amateur and he worked alone, without even an editor to advise him.
[So, when it came to making choices about how to frame a scene or write a piece of dialogue, he had nowhere to go except his untrained eye and ear. No wonder he made bad choices.
[On the other plane, however, where his expertise lay, he had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of the medium. But that’s just temporary. Variety points out that
the baby is going to grow up. And what will it look like when it does? “Dreams of Violets” offers indications of at least a few of the places that AI, as its symbiosis with the industry grows and gathers force (which it surely will), might go.
[Some day, and probably soon, given the speed at which time passes in the cyber world, AI will be able to compensate for all the problems the reviewers above all spotlighted. That may or may not be a goof thing for the industry, but it’s gonna happen sure as God made little green apples.
[In the hands of an actual
filmmaker with a real screenplay, Dreams
of Violets will become just a far-off—in computer terms—memory, like black-and-white
TV or color TV with the colors that bled.]
