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.
a pair of young lovers, Megan (Jackie Kreisler) and Dylan (Shane Elliott, above), who
are on a road trip through the
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.
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.
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)