Dream­land

“We’re in a dif­fer­ent world,” says a griz­zled hit­man (Stephen McHat­tie) of his sur­round­ings near the end of Dream­land. He’s not wrong, and the clue is in the title. Bruce McDonald’s film plays out in a world that is at once recog­nis­able and yet con­struct­ed from the arti­fi­cial trap­pings of pure genre. A dream­world, so to speak, built on a foun­da­tion of cin­e­mat­ic tropes.

The set­ting is an unnamed Euro­pean city, where the hit­man has been sent by his gang­land boss Her­cules (Hen­ry Rollins) to remove the pinky from a ​‘mae­stro’ trum­pet play­er (also played by McHat­tie) whose sole offence was to for­get nar­cis­sis­tic Her­cules’ name. Yet in Dream­land, con­fu­sion over people’s names is a mind­set with which the view­er will eas­i­ly be able to Iden­ti­ty. After all, the mae­stro musi­cian, a Chet Bak­er fig­ure who mix­es jazz mas­tery with a hard hero­in habit, is nev­er actu­al­ly named in the film. And the hit­man who briefly pur­sues him, though repeat­ed­ly asked for his own name, reveals it only in the film’s final scene.

“You have to under­stand one thing,” the hit­man tells the young boy Dario (Mor­gan Csarno-Peklar), after agree­ing to help res­cue his 14-year-old sis­ter Olivia (Thémis Pauwels) from child pros­ti­tu­tion and sex traf­fick­ing. ​“We start out a bunch of peo­ple, but we end up as one.” On one lev­el, the con­flict­ed hit­man is allud­ing to trans­for­ma­tion­al moral deci­sions he has just made – to spare the mae­stro, to save the girl – bridge-burn­ing, life-alter­ing deci­sions which will set the hit­man on a path against his for­mer employ­er Her­cules, while cement­ing his own character.

On anoth­er lev­el, though, these words point to the way these two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple – the musi­cian and the killer – slow­ly cir­cle and merge into each anoth­er until they end up as dif­fer­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the one mul­ti-faceted char­ac­ter. After all, both are pro­fes­sion­al artists strug­gling for integri­ty in a degrad­ed world of com­pro­mise and corruption.

Both serve mas­ters – respec­tive­ly the thug­gish Her­cules and the unscrupu­lous Count­ess (Juli­ette Lewis) – whose deca­dent make­up demeans every­one around them. Both seem at times to expe­ri­ence extra-sen­so­ry per­cep­tions of what the oth­er is doing else­where (“he can be in two places at once,” as Her­cules says of the mae­stro), as though they are inti­mate­ly, impos­si­bly connected.

Both even, like actu­al iden­ti­cal twins, share a cer­tain pecu­liar phys­i­cal attribute. And both are played by the same actor, McHat­tie, whose pres­ence in these dual rôles (some­times in the one scene) serves as a con­stant reminder that these two char­ac­ters rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent sides of the same coin: a soul lost in an amoral lim­bo, hop­ing to find peace and some­how to remain him­self in his pas­sage to the oth­er side.

That jour­ney towards death is expressed through sev­er­al gen­res, stitched sur­re­al­ly togeth­er: the neon-lit noir of Her­cules’ club (called ​‘Al Qae­da’) below, the Count­ess’ fairy tale cas­tle above, the Kaf­ka-esque labyrinth of streets in between. There is even, amid all the con­tract killings, child gangs, crim­i­nal under­tak­ings and cli­mac­tic shoot ​’em up, a bizarre ele­ment of Goth­ic, as the Count­ess’ broth­er (Tómas Lemar­quis) – a lit­er­al vam­pire – seeks to mar­ry Olivia for her vir­gin blood.

It is just one of sev­er­al ways in which the film tells a sto­ry of chil­dren falling vic­tim to adult pre­da­tion, along­side Her­cules’ pimp­ing of young girls, and the Count­ess’ readi­ness to make chil­dren avail­able for the plea­sure of her par­ty guests. It is as though McDonald’s film starts out a bunch of sto­ries, and ends up as one. Only the names have been changed.

The last time direc­tor Bruce McDon­ald teamed up with writer Tony Burgess was for Pon­ty­pool, an inge­nious and sophis­ti­cat­ed hor­ror film in which the vec­tor for a zomb­i­fy­ing virus is lan­guage itself. Freely adapt­ing from his own ​‘unfilmable’ 1995 nov­el ​‘Pon­ty­pool Changes Every­thing’, Burgess con­fined Pontypool’s events to the van­tage of a snowed-in radio stu­dio where shock jock Grant Mazz­ie (McHat­tie) and his pro­duc­er Syd­ney Bri­ar (played by McHattie’s then wife Lisa Houle) slow­ly realise that Mazzie’s irony-tinged, free-asso­cia­tive on-air pat­ter may be as much cause as cure of the evolv­ing apocalypse.

A sur­re­al coda sees the pair, now renamed ​‘John­ny Dead­eyes’ and ​‘Lisa the Killer’ and dressed as char­ac­ters from genre pic­tures, attempt­ing to escape the infec­tious­ness of nor­ma­tive lan­guage and thought by rein­vent­ing the stu­dio space around them as ​“a new place that isn’t even there yet.” For years, there have been rumours that McDon­ald and Burgess’ film would be the first in a Pon­ty­pool tril­o­gy (to be fol­lowed by Pon­ty­pool Changes and Pon­ty­pool Changes Everything).

But in the mean­time, Dream­land serves as a sort-of side-quel, branch­ing out from the coda to Pon­ty­pool, as the hit­man (whose late-revealed name you can prob­a­bly guess) is liv­ing out an escapist genre fan­ta­sy, occa­sion­al­ly part­nered up with Lisa (Houle again), who now works at Al Qaeda.

If Dream­land con­cerns itself with bad peo­ple ​‘break­ing good’, and shows the hit­man and Lisa work­ing togeth­er to save a vic­tim of child abuse and exploita­tion, this redeems not just the hit­man, but also his oth­er dou­ble, the DJ Mazz­ie, who in Burgess’ orig­i­nal nov­el, if not in the 2008 film, was him­self a pae­dophile – and who here seems to be strug­gling to divest him­self of that guilt, and to wash away the blood on his hands, before he can final­ly rest in peace. The result is a tru­ly strange film.

For while its hard-boiled escapades can be watched and enjoyed even by those who know noth­ing about Pon­ty­pool, Dream­land offers the nich­est (but also rich­est) of plea­sures to the already niche audi­ence of those who know and love McDon­ald and Burgess’ pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion, whose char­ac­ters and events it recon­fig­ures and trans­lates into entire­ly dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic idioms.

Dream­land is avail­able on DVD and HD dig­i­tal down­load now via Bull­dog Film Distribution.