In Dream Scenario, Nicolas Cage appears in people’s dreams and, when those dreams turn into nightmares, gets canceled for it. Does that sound like a good enough hook? I have a soft spot for films that deal with dreams, nightmares, and twisted fantasies. Dream Scenario touches upon all these and then some. It’s the eeriest dream-based film I’ve seen since Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There’s one more reason for making that comparison. At one point, a woman mentioning a dream becomes a trigger for cheating possibilities from Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) and his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson). This situation evokes the same awkwardness that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman encountered in Eyes Wide Shut. (They don’t take off their clothes or smoke pot while arguing over whether men or women think more about sex, though.) And like Kubrick, Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli doesn’t offer all the answers in Dream Scenario, yet another impactful addition to the roster of Cage films that recently saw a resurgence of the serious performer we saw long ago.
Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Dylan Gelula, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera
The film sees Cage at his finest, evoking the angst and helplessness of some of his much celebrated early roles as Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out the Dead or Matchstick Men, while not resorting to, and admirably so, a retread of what came earlier. Paul Matthews is a researcher with lofty ambitions, but he is just one of the many dealing with the disappointment of seeing his peers overtake him. This film is a chain of one awkward scenario after another. (Awkward Scenarios would make a good alternate title.)
One lunch table conversation has Paul accusing a former batchmate of plagiarising his work without crediting him. It’s even more awkward when he has to record the conversation because his wife had told him to do so earlier, and while playing back the audio, he realises how badly he had ‘performed’ in front of her. Cage demonstrates Paul’s overwhelming cringe reaction to it in an endearingly palpable manner. We feel pity for him, and we wish he had approached the situation in a better way. But that’s who he is, and things increasingly get worse for him.
Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt that you had met them somewhere before? Dream Scenario presents this deja vu moment for hundreds of individuals. What peculiar quality about Paul makes him enter everyone’s dreams — and later nightmares? There’s no answer. He is, after all, an ordinary nerdy professor with no standout qualities. Oddly enough, one of his lectures has him talking about the ‘standout’ qualities of some creatures in the animal kingdom, such as the zebra. And now, Paul, with no standout qualities, begins to attract notice from everywhere because people — including one of his daughters — have either seen him as a mere observer in their dreams or, in the case of a young female advertising executive, the subject of her twisted sexual fantasy, the recreation of which brings about an embarrassing outcome. Apart from this instance, an emotion-heavy moment where Paul becomes forced to make a video statement reminds us again how phenomenal Cage can be when placed in the right hands.
When Paul’s presence takes on an increasingly menacing tone, when dreams turn into nightmares, Dream Scenario incorporates unnerving elements of psychological horror, entering the territory of David Cronenberg, albeit briefly, while also exploring themes that are right up the alley of someone like Spike Jonze or Charlie Kaufman. One is also reminded briefly of Adam McKay’s work, when Paul is contacted by a marketing firm to be the face of a familiar soft drink brand — to make him a ‘daily’ image, with the product, in the mind of consumers before they sleep. When placed amidst cancel culture and influencer trends, the absurdness of this situation gets accentuated by the presence of an excellent Michael Cera, who, along with his colleagues, is trying to make a deal with a man whose profession they have no clue about. How can you not crack up when a corporate woman discreetly Googles what Nicolas Cage is talking about?
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