Dreamcatcher has to be one of the most audacious of all Stephen King adaptations, if only because it hews so closely to what is one of his weirdest novels. It’s so strange that it immediately took me back a distinctively pre-social media experience – going to the movies, or renting a video, and being confronted with something unexpectedly insane. A couple of narrative threads interweave – first, a group of friends (Timothy Olyphant, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Thomas Jane) who share psychic abilities and are having a hunting weekend in Maine; second, this same group of friends, as children, who develop their psychic ability following an encounter with an intellectually disabled savant called Duddy in their hometown of Derry; third, an alien invasion that occurs in Maine on the weekend of their hunting trip; and fourth, the government response to this alien invasion, led by Colonel Abraham Curtis, played by Morgan Freeman. In the psychic networks between the characters, and in the snowy isolation of much of the action, Dreamcatcher recalls both The Dead Zone and Misery, but inflected through a much later, more sombre, version of King.

Of all these narrative threads, the most vital is the telepathic network between the four men who are haunted by the events of their childhood in Derry. This setup is not dissimilar to It but the critical difference is that these are all men, meaning that they express both their preternatural anxiety and their psychic abilities through machismo. We meet one of them using his telepathic powers to help an attractive woman find her keys so that a date quickly ensues, and as soon as they reunite their rapport descends back into bro-y banter, such as the difference between “fuckaroo” and “fuckaree,” braggadocio about who can “stay hard” longest, but also gallows humour about their increasing reliance on Viagra. In other words it’s a mid-life crisis text and speaks to a United States in the grip of a similar exhaustion as the War in Iraq looms on the horizon. For as new as the aliens are to the friends, Freeman’s Colonel has been fighting them for a quarter of a century, containing one invasion site after another, in a forever war that shows no signs of ever really resolving.

This produces the most striking sequence in the film, a flashback that replays King’s primal scene of Derry but in a minor key – a sourer, crueller, grittier revision of Stand By Me in which the four friends follow the local train lines in the direction of a dead body and come face to face with the local bullies, along with Duddy’s telepathic powers, which they “catch” in turn. However this flashback comes from a very different vantage point to Stand By Me, the stable middle-class melancholy of Richard Dreyfuss’ character, and its counterpart in the 80s nostalgic image, now replaced with a chaotic and anarchic vision of late middle age that corrodes any consistent tonality. Of course, the event looming in the background here is King’s catastrophic car accident, and the contrast between this trauma and the stately vantage point of Dreyfuss’ car in the opening scene of Stand By Me couldn’t be sharper. Filtered through Dreamcatcher, the main work he composed while he was recovering with the aid of Oxycontin, King’s accident marks a premature shift from late middle age to old age, and the film’s alternation between visceral body horror and fractured states of consciousness feels like a document of that experience; the working title was Cancer.

That fusion of abject embodiment and the atonal anxieties of late middle-age imbues Dreamcatcher with one of the most unusual tonalities of any King adaptation: a kind of strained juvenile register that is desperate to rein in and contain the body through either horror or humour but can’t quite settle on either. Even before the aliens emerge the four friends are obsessed with toilet humour, so the endless burping and flatulence initially feel like an extension of their comic rapport, until the alien comes out of their behinds in the most revolting way. Apparently King’s main quip about the novel was that he was going to do for the toilet what Psycho did for the shower but, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the “hidden” innovation of Hitchcock’s film (at least to us in the present) was that it showed American audiences a flushing commode for the first time. In that sense, Dreamcatcher plays as an evacuation of both American horror history and King’s own horror lineage to make way for something more repulsive and uncontainable, as evinced in the bathetic invocation of other classic films – Freeman’s colonel calls the alien “Ripley, after the broad in the Alien movies,” while one of the friends later note that “This time the ETs belong to you.” The peak (or nadir) of these references come with a Star Wars wipe cut followed by Freeman speaking through a mask, an evisceration and abjectification of film signifiers.

Dreamcatcher thus finds King, and perhaps Lawrence Kasdan, at a crisis point, and yet that makes the sheer narrative ambition of it all quite fascinating – more attuned to one of King’s anthology films from the 80s, long out of vogue by the early 00s. Like those films it’s more than the sum of its parts, genuinely evoking nightmares in the way it revolves through weird incidents that never quite link up but resonate in uneasily dissonant ways. One of the most memorable of these is the “Memory Warehouse,” a mnemonic device that Harris’ character uses to visualise his inner cognitive sanctum, and it is here that he retreats when the alien starts taking over his body. Rather than simply allude to this mental space, Kasdan crafts an entire subplot in which Harris’ character eludes the monster by retreating to increasingly sequestered spaces within the Memory Warehouse, in what often feels like a cipher for watching the film itself – for Dreamcatcher is a film you shrink from, retreat from, attempt to escape, as its sheer repulsive strangeness threatens to overwhelm you. Adding to that alterity is the difficulty of discerning vast swathes of the mise-en-scene, since Kasdan’s default is a deep blue, a corruption of the luminous blues of the 80s nostalgia film, that makes it hard to separate characters and objects from the background, especially once the blizzard and bright searchlights remove depth from the frame, which is further fractured by all the flashbacks and asides needed to keep this enormous narrative architecture in play.

This dissonance comes to a head in the showdown, which is quite anticlimactic narratively, but spectacular in terms of the way it situates us amongst a vertiginously sliding scale of images. The alien spreads through tiny worms and only one is needed to infect an entire water supply, so Kasdan ends with one of these worms poised on the brink of a sewer that leads to the entire Boston sewage system, while a fully grown version of the alien, impossible to visualise or conceive in its entirety, so mercurially and aggressively does it shape-shift, grapples with the last survivors in the background. It’s impossible to take in all the details of this showdown at once, especially once the alien starts fusing, morphing, fighting and exploding, in a spectacular CGI sequence that makes Dreamcatcher ultimately feel like a precursor to the messiness of a CGI-saturated media landscape, right down to the abrasive and atonal shift to aggressive electronica over the closing credits. It feels right, then, that the aliens initially pose as the “greys” of an older invasion film; they mimic the smoothness of ET, the serene containment of 80s prosthetics, but only to disguise the fractured CGI world they are bringing into existence, the world Kasdan’s film dramatises.