Dreamland

If you can handle a movie with a jam-packed ridiculous narrative that doesn’t entirely solve itself, then you should definitely watch Dreamland.

Strange, challenging and boundlessly confident, this tripped-out noir from the Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (best known for his 2009 horror movie, “Pontypool”) is part lucid dream, part drugged-out nightmare.

Instead of sinking in, I found myself yearning for the classics it has either been influenced by or is borrowing heavily from. If this were a more academic exercise it should have come with an extensive works cited page.

Wildly episodic in structure and violent in the extreme, Dreamland doesn't fully succeed in sustaining its outlandish conceits. The pacing also drags significantly despite its brief running time, lapsing into a talkiness that provides too much opportunity to pick apart its absurdities.

In the end, Dreamland never bothers to decide whether it’s trying to be an elegiac, philosophical head trip or an over-the-top action thriller.

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

If Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s dreams are anything like the disgusting underworld we see in his new movie Dreamland, get the man a doctor.