To have one Stephen McHattie in your movie may be considered a fortuitous accident. To have two is clearly casting genius.
Ontario director Bruce McDonald doubles down with the gaunt Nova Scotian actor in his newest movie, Dreamland , which marks the fifth (and sixth!) time the two have collaborated on the big screen. Granted, this time it’s the small screen in your house, but Dreamland was lucky enough to play some festival venues before the pandemic.
McHattie stars as The Maestro, a drug-addicted trumpet player who’s been hired to perform at the wedding of a vampire (the elegantly creep-tastic Tómas Lemarquis) to a child bride. But McHattie also stars as Johnny Dead Eyes, a hit man tasked by a gangster named Hercules (Henry Rollins) with cutting off The Maestro’s right pinkie finger to settle an old score.
The credits cheekily announce it was 'shot on location in Dreamland'
The whole story unravels in a noirish, neon-soaked unspecified European city. The credits cheekily announce it was “shot on location in Dreamland,” but there seems to be Belgian and Luxembourgian money in the mix.
Regardless, this is a place where armed gangs of pre-pubescent children roam the streets, and where the notion of a vampire in the local castle is regarded as perfectly natural. (Juliette Lewis is hilarious as The Countess, high-strung sister of this grinning Nosferatu-wannabe.)
Dreamland , while never quite abandoning logic altogether, follows its own loose sense of causation that makes watching it a dream-like experience in itself, all the way to a kind of afterlife epilogue. 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.
Dreamland is available on demand on May 29.
3.5 stars out of 5
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
