DREAM SCENARIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Dream Scenario, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

Dream Scenario is about unexpected—but not necessarily unwanted—fame coming to the most unlikely of people. He's a professor of evolutionary biology at a small college, who desperately wants more out of his life but is either too comfortable or too insecure to actually do anything about it.

We first meet him, not in physical form, but in the dream of one of his daughters, and it's not the last time we'll see Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), a man with a personality as forgettable as his name, in someone else's dream. That's the premise of writer/director Kirstoffer Borgli's weirdly funny and slightly haunting film, as Paul becomes a presence in the dreams of people around the world for reasons that no one can explain.

Paul doesn't comprehend the phenomenon for sure, and worse, he has no clue how either to take advantage of his international celebrity or to just lay low in order to avoid the spotlight. He's too stubborn to accomplish the former option and too vain to even consider the latter.

That makes Borgli's story more the study of a specific type of personality than a gimmicky sort of tale. If it means the whole thing is a bit muddled and arrives at a final place of uncertain confusion, that's actually the correct path for this story about a man who doesn't know what he wants and continues to find or fall into multiple ways to ensure the whole situation keeps getting worse for him.

This is definitely a parable about the perils and pitfalls of sudden fame in a modern world, where everyone could be famous for a short period either with a bit of effort or completely by accident. More than that, though, it's about the kind of person who finds the possibility too alluring to pass up—even if that individual has nothing of much value or interest to offer others.

Cage's performance is the perfect embodiment of that kind of man, thanks to his mostly bald pate, an unkempt beard, and layers of tops that seem as much about hiding the form of his paunch than the function of keeping warm. Anyone could see this man on the street and instantly forget about him almost immediately, and indeed, that's mostly how Paul has lived his life. Yes, he's somehow married to Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a kind and attractive and successful woman, and has two daughters, Sophie (Lily Bird) and Hannah (Jessica Clement), with her, but if Sophie's opening dream is any indication, he's more a fixture in the home than an active participant.

After all, the Paul of the girl's dream just stands there, raking leaves by the pool, as things—a set of keys and a shoe—and a person fall from the sky. The real-life Paul takes quite the offense to his daughter's perception of him in this way, even and especially if it's only a subconscious one.

The early joke of the setup, as everyone slowly realizes that Paul's appearance in countless people's dreams has become something of a psychic epidemic, is that all of his appearances in those sleeping minds are entirely passive. Someone, for example, is being hunted in the woods by a ghoulish figure, only for Paul to be more distracted by some fungi than feeling it necessary to help the poor guy, and another is surrounded by alligators, only for Paul to notice, take a beat, and walk away from the creatures. What does this say about how people perceive him, and what does that perception say about him as a person?

What we get to know about Paul, which is the other and subtler part of Cage's performance, is a pretty clear case of a narcissist. He doesn't seem the type, to be sure, but how else can his reactions and behavior surrounding this strange, constant occurrence be interpreted? He's petty about a colleague who has actually done the work he always meant to do—yet couldn't find the time or make the effort to do so. He's jealous about his wife being friendly with her co-worker, even though she clearly loves his schlubby self for whatever reason and even as he's playing out a younger woman's sexual dream in her apartment.

That second part arrives after a marketing agency tries to pitch him on some advertising opportunities, and Paul is too self-involved to realize that no one in that room or elsewhere really cares about his unfulfilled dreams. They only care and increasingly start to worry that such a boring guy keeps turning up people's dreams. The scene in the apartment is a clever turning point, as the Paul in the dreams of this younger woman (played by Dylan Gelula) takes initiative and control, but the real Paul remains timid and—let's say—finishes the fantasy more than a bit early.

The story's darker turn after this encounter gets at some broad ideas about modern culture, particularly the expectations and moral standards that people hold over famous people. If Borgli doesn't quite seem to know what he wants to say about such matters (except that they exist and can be overblown), the more fascinating element is what this development, with Paul becoming the stuff of worldwide nightmares, says about the potential for vanity to transform into entitlement, for stubbornness to become controlling, and for a lack of self-awareness to mean the possibility of becoming the worst parts of oneself.

There's plenty of imagination on display in Dream Scenario, as this clever premise plays out in some unexpected ways. The real, discomforting heart of the story, though, is in its precise dissection of its main character—a man who says he doesn't want to be famous, even though he does everything to prove the opposite, and reveals how sadly pathetic unearned fame can be.

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