2019 Canadian film
Dreamland is a 2019 Canadian fantasy drama-thriller film, directed by Bruce McDonald.[1] The film stars Stephen McHattie in a dual role as The Maestro, a jazz musician who has been hired by the Countess (Juliette Lewis) to play at the wedding of her vampire brother (Tómas Lemarquis), and Johnny Deadeyes, a hitman who has been hired by crime boss Hercules (Henry Rollins) to kill the musician.[2]
The film has been described as a "spinoff" of McDonald's 2008 film Pontypool, in that it jumps off from the post-credits scene in Pontypool in which McHattie and Lisa Houle were depicted in period garb speaking a foreign language.[3]
The film premiered at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in 2019,[4] and was screened at various film festivals before going into commercial release in 2020.[1] It received mixed reviews from critics who noted the lack of coherence.
Production
The film was shot in Belgium and Luxembourg.[5] Its score was composed principally by Jonathan Goldsmith, although it also includes a jazz-based arrangement of Eurythmics' 1999 single "I Saved the World Today".[6]
Although not named within the film, the character of the jazz musician was loosely based on Chet Baker.[7]
Critical response
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a positive score of 54% with rating average of 5.8/10 based on 37 reviews. The critics' consensus states: "While it may entrance audiences in search of the thoroughly strange, Dreamland lives down to its title by failing to cohere in any meaningful way."[8]
Alex Rose of Cult MTL wrote that "Though it would be simple to just call Dreamland second-rate Lynch and leave it at that, there’s both more going on here and less lofty ideals than one might expect. Where a lot of these films (recent examples off the top of my head include Terminal, Passion Play, Hotel Artemis and Mute) fail is in their absolute lack of a sense of humour; even the ones that are would-be black comedies tend to fall completely up their own assholes in a smug acceptance of irony as the end-all be-all. Dreamland, to its complete and utter benefit, is a film that both wallows in grotesque clichés and seeks to upend them."[1]
For That Shelf, Pat Mullen opined that "There’s some promise to the ludicrously violent doppelgänger schadenfreude between the McHatties. However, the all-over-the-map screenplay veers in too many directions. Dreamland evokes the hazy fever of a midnight madness flick. It flows in and out of scenes like a woozy couch potato channel-surfing at 2 AM...Dreamland often feels weird simply for the sake of being weird. One can only imagine which drugs had higher potency: the ones that fuelled the screenplay or the ones McDonald downed before reading it."[2]
Chris Knight of Postmedia wrote that "It's the kind of film that would have killed at the Toronto festival's Midnight Madness program, and it may have a harder time finding its audience in the scattered realm of VOD. But its boozy, Chet-Baker-meets-Eurythmics vibe (just wait for The Maestro's closing number) makes it a late-night trip worth taking."[9]
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