Train Dreams is the kind of film that demands to be watched in the dark with the outside world turned out so that you can enter a tunnel and travel to the world beyond. Clint Bentley’s drama, which is out on Netflix, is in the mould of Terrence Malick’s immersive, sensual films.

Bentley and Greg Kewdar’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name is about “a world that has gone”, which has been “rolled up like a scroll but you still feel the echo of it”. These thoughts are expressed through a voiceover by the film’s hero, movingly played by Joel Edgerton.

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Edgerton’s Robert is among the workers in one of the railroad projects that will transform America’s economy in the early 20th century. Robert works alongside other Americans and immigrants. He witnesses the possibilities as well as the harshness involved in ripping up trees from the earth and laying out ribbons of steel.

Robert is building something else on a smaller scale – a home. He marries Gladys (Felicity Jones) and they have a daughter together. But a domestic tragedy turns Robert’s life upside down. The economy changes too, setting him on a path that is filled with painful memories and hard decisions.

The locations and Adolpho Veloso’s gorgeous cinematography evoke a vanished era in which beauty and brutality co-exist. The extraordinary shifts in the physical and emotional landscape causes ripples in Robert’s mental state. This ordinary man struggles to find his place in a world that he has helped create.

Apart from Edgerton, the humanist drama has compelling performances from Felicity Jones as Edgar’s beloved wife and William H Macy as a wily, work-shirking explosives expert. Train Dreams balances scale with intimacy, intense feeling with delicate observation. The Terrence Malick touch is most vividly felt in the dreamy scenes between Robert and Gladys as they attempt to carve out an idyll for themselves.