Dreamland, Film4, All4, Written by Nicolaas Zwart, Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/dreamland

In one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short stories ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find,’ the grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida on vacation. This is the era of the Great Depression in America. She rattles on about this fellow that’s escaped from the State Pen, ‘The Misfit’.  She doesn’t want to go anywhere with such a fellow ‘aloose’.

Dreamland has Alison Wells (Margot Robbie) aloose with a $10 000 reward on her pretty head. She’s Bonnie and Clyde rolled into two silk stockings. But her last bank job has left her bust with a bullet in her leg. She ends hiding up in an outhouse beside a Texan farm whose topsoil has blown somewhere over Washington.  

Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) is the boy with big dreams. He talks about the reward money in the same way the grandmother in O’Connor’s story talks about the Misfit. But the Misfit here turns out to be MILF. I went along for the ride. But I guess it’s one of those films shooting blanks. Not bad. Can there be any more damning praise?