Directed by: Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn
Distributed by: Yellow Veil Pictures
Written by Michael Clawson
60/100
Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s “Dream Team” is what you might call a “vibes” movie. A sparkly, sun-dappled, and pleasurably silly riff on crime drama, it melds erotica and absurdism through a plot that’s digressive and comically inert. It’s as tensionless as a movie about an inter-continental mystery could be, but texturally, it’s got personality.
Told episodically in the style of a retro police procedural, the story centers on two Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) as they travel from B.C. to the beaches of Mexico on an investigation into a series of deaths. The film spins off from there into variously sensual and strange directions. Hungtai’s character dreams he’s a dog running around a shoreline. He and Garrel meet a lingerie-clad ocean scientist named Veronica Beef. Two female Interpol interns play tennis back at headquarters. For reasons that are still totally lost on me, Garrel has a colleague who’s invisible. Story logic floats away on the many shots of sea waves.
As for the vibes themselves, they’re by no means majorly intoxicating, but they’re just potent enough to sustain the film through its bizarre non-sequiturs and general lack of momentum. In a style reminiscent of Sean Price Williams, Horn’s 16mm cinematography draws a hazy fluorescence out of everything from coastal sunsets to coral reef research labs filled with old-school tech. Vaguely campy performances, particularly by the aforementioned Dr. Beef, work within the film’s context of potboiler TV pastiche. To put it all another way, “Dream Team” is chillwave in film form, saturated in irony and sexual energy. It might just barely hang together, but it’s still a fun movie to just hang out to.
Michael Clawson is a member of the Seattle Film Critic Society you can follow his passion for film on Letterboxd.