By Nicole Veneto

Sitting in my bedroom, viewing a screener copy of Dream Team, my initial bewilderment eventually curdled into boredom.

Dream Team, directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. Currently being shown exclusively in cinemas.

.

INTERPOL agents No (Esther Garrel) and Chase (Alex Zhang Hungtai) are on the case in Dream Team. Photo: Yellow Veil Pictures

Every so often a movie comes my way where I am at a complete loss for words in trying to describe what exactly it is or what it’s trying to do. Occasionally this is a sign a film is taking the medium in a radically different direction, a game changer that will be reclaimed and celebrated in the ensuing years. Other times, it’s a sign that a movie has just straight up failed, either in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way or as something that’s uniformly terrible. One of the biggest challenges in film criticism is being able to immediately tell these two kinds of films apart. Many respected film critics have failed to recognize a future cult classic or critically reappraised oddity at the time of release. In his negative review for Freddy Got Fingered, Roger Ebert wrote, “The day may come when ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.” He only got the first part right.

In this case, the film in question is Dream Team, directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn and executive produced by I Saw the TV Glow’s Jane Schoenbrun, whose attachment to the project is the primary reason I decided to take it on. The distributors, Yellow Veil Pictures, are savvy enough to know that emphasizing Jane’s involvement serves as good marketing for Kalman and Horn’s “acclaimed” and “absurdist homage to ’90s basic cable TV thrillers.” “Acclaimed” is a real stretch (apparently there were tons of walkouts when it screened at MIFF) and, as broadly true as the latter descriptor is, Dream Team falls comparatively short in this aspect given that its executive producer made the definitive homage to ’90s television just this year. I’m not going to say I was tricked into watching Dream Team, but I’m beginning to think “executive produced by Jane Schoenbrun” means the same thing as “executive produced by Jordan Peele,” if you catch my drift.

This is normally where I would give a plot synopsis. The problem posed by Dream Team is that any attempt to explain the plot in detail would be like trying to recount something that happens after a blow to the head. This is presumably by Kalman and Horn’s design — the film is clearly wobbling down the absurdist, avant-garde aisle. Presented as seven episodes of the titular late-night television show, we follow a pair of INTERPOL agents, No (Esther Garrel) and Chase (Alex Zhang Hungtai), as they investigate a series of deaths caused by killer coral. “Investigating” isn’t really the right word for it — they’re trying to “learn the mystery” of the killer coral rather than solve it. Conveniently left out of this plot overview for my own sake is the pile up of non sequiturs, including but not limited to two investigative assistants who spend most of their screen time at the gym, an entire scene of people at a “nightclub” in fetish gear, and an invisible man. I liked the invisible man — all 60 seconds of him.

It might help to work through why Dream Team didn’t work for me. Aside from amusingly named episode titles like “Temporary Erogenous Zones“ and an assemblage of B-roll footage passed off for opening credit sequences, Kalman and Horn don’t try very hard to maintain stylistic verisimilitude with the television format. As cinematographer, Whitney Horn chooses to shoot on 16mm film stock. This contributes some appropriately oneiric visuals, yet it hardly reflects the fuzzy, lo-fi texture of ’90s television that Jane Schoenbrun so perfectly recreated in TV Glow. Other films have staked their entire premises on recreating television broadcasts of yore, such as The WNUF Halloween Special and Out There Halloween Mega Tape. Like Dream Team, neither of those films had significant budgets, but they were still able to use their meager funds to throw together fun commercial breaks reflective of their decades. There are a few moments when Dream Team feels like something you’d catch channel surfing as your eyes grow heavy with sleep. Or perhaps an example of what I imagine a soft-core offering airing on Cinemax in 1997 would look like. But for the most part, the film simply doesn’t commit to its own concept or seem all that interested in the stylistic possibilities it could explore.

I’m usually an easy mark for something this abstract, odd, and lightly avant-garde, so the fact that Dream Team became such a tedious watch the longer it went on is a real drag. As the title suggests, Dream Team operates through dream logic and free association, not tight plotting or a traditional three-act structure. But in the former there’s usually an overarching plot — in this case, INTERPOL agents “learning the mystery” of killer coral — or character we stick with, allowing us to weave in and out of weirder, dreamier tangents without getting lost.

I kept thinking of Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates as an example of a film that successfully pulls the audience along through unrelated incidents by following a young woman through her Alice in Wonderland-esque encounters. Dream Team, meanwhile, is so flimsy and aimless that it becomes bogged down in non sequiturs to the point of being inert. Neither Garrel or Zhang Hungtai has much presence, or chemistry together, which makes their scenes (i.e., the core plot), for all their absurdity, fall flat. Even if this is all intentional, it really just tested my patience to watch something with nothing to grab onto.

As a film critic, I’m always running the risk of getting things “wrong” or misunderstanding the work being presented to me. Sometimes I come to a definitive conclusion about a movie long after I’ve written a review on it. I don’t have years or decades of retroactive analysis to help guide my understanding, only my feelings toward what I’m seeing in the moment. And sitting in my bedroom, viewing a screener copy of Dream Team, my initial bewilderment eventually curdled into boredom. This presents a significant challenge to me as someone tasked with writing about the movie — what do I want to say and how do I go about saying it? Did Roger Ebert think about this as Tom Green sang “Daddy Would You Like Some Sausage?” back in 2001? There’s a chance I might return to Dream Team in the future and be on the right wavelength to “get it.” As of right now, though, I’d rather dream of something else.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.

.