‘Dream Team’ Review: Hazy Indie Tests the Limits of How Unserious a Sci-Fi Procedural Can Be

Underground filmmaking duo Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn aren’t exactly honing a style with their new feature “Dream Team,” their fourth in 15 years. That would imply that there’s some fully realized form that their offhand humor and nonsense divergences are working toward. The film, which is receiving a limited theatrical release in New York and L.A. on Nov. 15, starts on firm ground, with a familiar buddy-detective premise that many a late-night genre junk programmer has used as a sturdy narrative foundation. Unlike those commercial efforts, “Dream Team” hardly has continuity, much less narrative build, top of mind, instead reshaping itself every few minutes with a new surrealistic flourish, and seemingly no particular destination mapped out. Playful as that can be, the film often comes across like a private joke.

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The two leads are a team of Interpol agents, played by the dynastic French film staple Esther Garrel and ambient musician Alex Zhang Hungtai. The pair task themselves with parsing apart an illegal smuggling operation — the MacGuffin, and perhaps even the monster of the week, being a collection of sea coral samples that squirt out potentially lethal toxic emissions. There’s a trail of bodies to account for, but the two are quick to assure others that they have no police authority. They’re hardly even investigators. They don’t “solve mysteries,” one of them argues. They just try to “understand them.”

It’s an early pronouncement that conveys the unruffled haze that encompasses “Dream Team,” further seen in its casual penchant for bad wordplay. Along with some double-entendre dialogue, episode title cards reading “Ashes to Asses” and “Fax on the Beach” are spaced throughout the story (the project first began as an idea for a web series). The film reaches an early peak with the introduction of the gloriously named Dr. Veronica Beef (Minh T Mia), who delivers a nonsense exposition dump that somehow begins in a laboratory and ends in a hot tub, with all the characters in a state of undress.

The film itself has an even flirtier demeanor. Shot in 16mm, “Dream Team” succeeds at a waking dream sheen, with its lush sunbeams and skeletal sets. The Interpol agents are on a globe-trotting mission per the narrator, but every café, office and resort looks like it’s part of the same seaside settlement. In a story with such copious coral, the indie production practically represents a fish tank itself, with lots of brightly lit, shoddy but charming imitations of tropical locales.

But the underwater calm proves deadening after some time, especially since occupants have the character of goldfish. The coral investigation leads Interpol to a series of quirked-up suspects, but most of the actors seem constricted to a certain deadpan delivery that’s been concocted to never threaten harshing the vibe. Though she’s playing a steady hand, Garrel makes the biggest impression, speaking in a French accent that gives the nonsense English gobbledygook a certain poetry. She lends credibility to loose genre rules, much as Kyle MacLachlan did in “Twin Peaks,” or Patrick Stewart in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” or any number of actors in ’90s projects that “Dream Team” is drawing elements from.

Like that first “Twin Peaks” run, Kalman and Horn’s story ends in a somewhat unresolved place, but not before taking on a grab-bag of narrative tangents. The filmmakers seem more enamored with the aesthetic possibilities of a genre television show, rather than the settled personality they’d be forced to arrive at if on the air for enough episodes. As such, the film practically seems to issue its own cancellation before its conclusion. There’s something romantic to that structure, but “Dream Team” still winds up a handsome dead end, coming off too flat to fully lift into a beguiling hum. A late scene introduces an invisible agent who blows smoke rings, an eccentricity that comes and goes with little novelty — a sign that the film’s intoxicating qualities having dulled into tranquilizing ones.