Wrecked by Success (2023) is a film that explores the porous boundaries between identity, memory, and grief, drawing inspiration from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), which examines the ways in which humans attempt to evade mortality. The film is rooted in a deeply personal experience: following her father’s passing, Carmen found herself repeatedly dreaming of becoming her mother. In these dreams, their identities merged into a single being, as if grief itself was searching for a shared vessel—an unconscious strategy to distribute loss, share strength, and survive transformation.

Through a cinematic language that blurs waking life and dream states, Wrecked by Success visualizes this merging of selves, questioning how grief manifests in both the body and the subconscious. The film’s rhythm is slow and hypnotic, with moments of quiet intimacy and detachment creating a dreamlike liminality. Fragmented dialogues and layered visuals evoke the shifting landscapes of the mind, suggesting that dreams are not just reflections of lived experiences but active spaces where emotional and psychological processing takes shape.

By allowing these dream encounters to unfold through film, Wrecked by Success explores the fluid nature of identity in the aftermath of loss. It suggests that there is still much to learn from the dream world—where personal histories, inherited emotions, and unresolved grief dissolve and reconfigure in unexpected ways.