Following their singular take on the Western genre with Two Plains and a Fancy, filmmakers Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn returned to the festival circuit earlier this year with Dream Team, an absurdist homage to ’90s basic-cable TV thrillers. Starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai, with a producing team that includes I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun, the film follows two hot INTERPOL agents who uncover an international, interspecies mystery. Described as “a post-modern, soft-core fever dream,” the first trailer and poster have now arrived ahead of release beginning on November 15 at Metrograph, courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.
Leonardo Goi said in his Rotterdam review, “Like its predecessors, Dream Team hangs in a hazy, oneiric region; what the film is about is a lot easier to discuss than the entrancing feeling it evokes. As corals the world over start killing humans with poisonous neon-colored gases, INTERPOL agents No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) and Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) are dispatched not to figure out so much as to ‘learn about’ the mystery, per their own admission, in a journey that keeps shuttling us from Mexico to British Columbia. Split into seven episodes, each given a beautifully evocative title (e.g. ‘Asses to Ashes’ or ‘Doppelgängbang’) and introduced by slightly different, growingly trippy renditions of the credit sequence, Dream Team apes a serialized TV structure only to frustrate the gratifications one would normally associate with the format. There’s no sense of closure here, much less clarity. As No and Chase travel south of the border, their quest gets more evanescent, and the plot––such as it is––more ethereal: storylines are dropped, new characters bob up everywhere, all while the mystery turns hopelessly intricate.”
See the trailer below.
