Shared Darkness

A moody,
three-quarter-sketched genre document somewhere between The X-Files, The Twilight
Zone, The Mothman Prophecies and
(surprisingly) a heartwarming Lifetime fictioner, writer-director James Lay’s Dreamland is a spooky, open-ended,
alien-tinged quasi-thriller that makes the most of its desolate landscapes. Shot
in deep shades of blue by cinematographer Jonathan Hale, the movie is an old
school, filmic exercise in the elongation of apprehension. When filmmaker Robert
Rodriguez talked, in Rebel without a Crew,
his tome about the making of El Mariachi,
about making a list of one’s assets, and then using those to help shape the
narrative of a movie, he could very well have been talking about a movie like
this, so spare and streamlined are its moves and payoffs.

The story centers on
a pair of young lovers, Megan (Jackie Kreisler) and Dylan (Shane Elliott, above), who
are on a road trip through the Nevada flatlands. When they stop at a greasy spoon
diner between the infamous “Area 51” and a radiation-poisoned nuclear testing ground,
things start to get weird. Kindhearted counter jockey Blake (Jonathan Breck) regales
them with stories of a crashed alien craft, much to the consternation of another
customer (Billie Joe Armstrong). Said patron’s irritation nearly escalates into
a fistfight, but Blake steps in and calms things down. Back on the road, Dylan
turns on the radio and finds a speech from Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. When
the car dies, a visitor appears in the rear window — a visitor from another
moment in time. When he and Megan get separated, Dylan gets “touched” somehow,
changed. When they reunite, and subsequently make their way back to Blake’s
diner, it’s just the beginning of a slurry mystery spanning worlds and time.

Lay (Razor) certainly doesn’t wind things up too
tightly, and while there are a few bits included seemingly only to up the
creepiness quotient, they’re not rooted in gore or effects work or anything
fashionable and hook-y like that. Jason and Nolan Livesay’s music is a weird,
grab-bag mixture, sometimes nicely reminiscent of an old school, Hitchcockian
thriller, but sometimes leaning inappropriately toward a slight comedic flavoring.
(The source tunes in the movie are otherwise solid, and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” gets a nice workout, too.)

If the physical staging of some of the scenes and the conveyance of spatial
relationships leaves a bit to be desired, Dreamland
is quite well acted, and possessing of some nice, unfussy visual passages. There’s
also an admirable, rewarding slow-play of details to match the low-key stakes
of the story. It ultimately doesn’t all come together in pat, a-ha! fashion; elliptical and a bit coy, Dreamland is characteristic of the difference between something that is really very well directed and smartly directed. Still, if you can take character-rooted nuance in your sci-fi, there’s
some genuine enjoyment to be found here.

There are
unfortunately no supplemental DVD extras on this single-disc release from Image
Entertainment, which comes in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with a Dolby
digital 5.1 audio track. Something, anything, from Lay would have been nice,
and as far as the transfer, while the blue-hued cinematography is nice to
behold in many scenes, the contrast is such that it renders other passages far
too murky. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

Cuba Gooding, Jr.) Or Leaving
Las Vegas nominee Elisabeth Shue, for that matter. It’s the latter who
stars in this straight-to-video thriller from writer-director Isaac Webb, a moody
little indie-minded movie in the vein of Rosemary’s
Baby and The Others, with a pinch
of Repulsion thrown in for good
measure.

Using post-partum depression as its leaping off point (Shue
apparently got the script before Brooke Shields could), First Born trades in issues of slippery slope sanity that Hollywood
productions would revel in, turning the amp up to 11. In his narrative feature freshman
effort, though, Webb, while definitely aiming for goosing shock, doesn’t feel
the need to explicitly set up these jolts, or always play out their immediate consequences
to the most logical conclusion. The result is a movie of not insignificant atmosphere,
but one that also feels like a bit of an intellectual casserole, with leftover
ideas emptied from the refrigerator of Webb’s mind in willy-nilly fashion.

Shue stars as well-to-do housewife and former dancer Laura,
who has the quintessentially perfect life. Upon discovering that she’s
pregnant, Laura soon after moves to the suburbs with her husband Steven (Steven
Mackintosh). His long hours and emotional disengagement feed her burgeoning
sense of isolation, physically paralleled by their spacious but sparsely
decorated, secluded country home. When their baby is born, it quickly becomes
apparent that being a mother is more challenging than Laura first imagined, as
she gradually begins a downward slide into despair.

All sorts of strange crud starts happening, and Laura naturally
questions her own sanity. From a mouse-infested basement with a mysterious
diary found in its walls to a peculiar new nanny (Kathleen Chalfant) that Steven
insists on employing to assist his increasingly erratic wife, the red herrings
and head feints come at a fast and furious clip. Even if a fairly film-savvy audience member is able to mostly sort these out rather quickly, and thus “call” the film’s ending long before First Born crosses the finish line, there’s some low-fi pleasure to be taken from a film that invests more in its characters than its CGI budget, particularly if one is partial to and missing Shue (yes, pun intended). Presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, First Born comes with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track, and optional Spanish subtitles. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)