Proper ‘why didn’t I think of that?!’ movie high-concepts are always hard to pull off, which is why it’s so impressive that Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario manages to actually have two. Behind its central premise of one man (played, of course, by Nicolas Cage) suddenly appearing in the dreams of thousands upon of thousands of strangers, its second big idea is the one that ultimately holds it all together – what if the most famous man in the world was also the least charismatic. It’s a question that allows magical realism to meet excruciating cringe comedy – two genres that very rarely inhabit the same film but, in the hands of Borgli and Cage, make for mostly perfect bedfellows here.
Cage plays Paul Matthews, an evolutionary biology professor at a New England university and a man so mild-mannered that his forgettable-ness borders on the pathetic. His capacity to fade into the background is soon ripped away from him though, when everyone from his daughters to his students to complete strangers from around the world start simultaneously seeing him in their dreams – mostly as an impassive observer whilst other more obviously ‘dream-y’ things occur. Suddenly, he’s the most famous and interesting (until you meet him in person, that is) man on the planet, a notoriety that, inevitably, backfires.
Paul is a painfully ordinary and dull man, and his early attempts to embrace his fame are a mix of endearing and almost unwatchable, culminating in a hilarious not-quite sex scene that is much more nightmare than dream. It’s a great role for Cage, not quite as raw and memorable as his performances in Pig or Mandy, but a startlingly complete picture of a man who is the dictionary definition of ‘just some guy’. He’s funny and sad and also deeply frustrating, which is the exact tonal tightrope the film is walking.
Eventually, Borgli switches over from cringe to satire after Paul’s dream appearances go from mundane to horrifying, his unwilling psychic companions starting to have nightmares of him killing them in increasingly graphic ways. Here, Borgli jumps into the cancel culture debate with a refreshingly deft hand – the film as a whole, in fact, is certainly less broad and wacky than you might expect from an elevator pitch of ‘Nicolas Cage as an accidental Freddy Krueger’. He extends empathy to both Paul, who is innocent, and his ‘victims’, whose traumas are no less real for that fact, while a brief but incisive note is made of the ways that those with fading fame jump to the alt-right to cultivate a smaller but more loyal audience of racists and rubes.
By the ending, Dream Scenario does rather run out of puff, and a final lurch into more overt sci-fi is mostly just deflating, even with some fun cameos. But the journey there is a funny, fascinating, and even surprisingly warm one, feeling very much like a more focused (though less stylish) version of Beau is Afraid from earlier this year (Ari Aster executive produces here and his hand is very much felt), led by another fantastic Cage performance.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 