‘Dream Scenario’ Is Bald Nicolas Cage’s Cancel-Culture Nightmare

David Fear
·6 min read
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dreamscenario_01 - Credit: A24
dreamscenario_01 - Credit: A24

Think about some of the weirdest dreams you’ve ever had. Maybe you were perched on a dining room table while hungry alligators slithered toward you. Or the one where you’re sitting by a swimming pool as various objects fall from the sky. Or that nightmare where a tall, terrifying man in tattered clothes slowly stalks you in the woods, while you seem to be stuck running in slow motion. Got one in mind? Good.

OK, now picture a schlubby, middle-aged man casually strolling through that dream. He’s not really doing anything, per se. Just sort of ambling past you, a random passerby in whatever oddball, WTF mind movie is unspooling during your usual R.E.M. cycles. Also, he looks a lot like Nicolas Cage if he was balding, bearded, bespectacled, and the most beta-male version of the Wild at Heart actor imaginable.

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Part horror movie and part sideways swipe at cancel culture and social pariahdom, Dream Scenario is the sort of high-concept, surreal comedy that Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman used to do on the regular — think Eternal Nicshine of the Spotless Cage. If it lacks the emotional undertow that characterized those movies from the late Nineties and early aughts, Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s off-kilter satire makes up for it by marinating everything in a slightly noxious blend of silly and unsettling. (You can feel trace tonal elements of its producer Ari Aster’s signature style as well; it will surprise exactly no one to discover that A24 is distributing this.)

And though the movie isn’t celebrity-specific, it also knows it has an ace in the hole in its star. Thanks to an interim agreement, Cage was able to grace the stage of Dream Scenario‘s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and sat for a post-screening Q&A. Though this wasn’t written for him, he said that the story of a guy who suddenly finds himself at the center of a viral phenomenon immediately struck a chord. Cage recalled waking up one morning to discover that someone had compiled scenes of him losing his shit onscreen and suddenly, everyone was looking at his work sans context or any sense of him having control over it. He’d gone from movie star to meme, and this film allowed Cage to turn that somewhat dehumanizing experience “from lead to a little bit of gold.”

Ironically enough, it also allows for the singular, singularly eccentric star to lose himself in a role that makes him nearly unrecognizable, yet still lets him flex his chops and fly a freak flag — there are plenty of stand-alone moments of Cage-rage and wow-so-that-was-a-choice line readings to fuel a “Loses His Shit” sequel. His nebbishy college professor Paul Matthews teaches classes on natural science, with an emphasis on herd mentalities and adaptation in the animal world; he’s currently trying to get a co-credit on an article from a colleague that borrows heavily on grad school research on “antelligence.” He’s also ridiculously easy to ignore. Students pay him little attention. His family affectionately belittles him; his wife (Julianne Nicholson) passive-aggressively pokes at his passiveness. The only thing remarkable about this everyman nobody is his whine, which almost puts Cage’s notorious Pokey-inspired voice from Peggy Sue Got Married to shame.

So it’s genuinely weird when a restaurant host he’s never met thinks she knows him from somewhere. Someone else mentions that they recognize him. A woman from his past mentions that Paul has been on her mind a lot lately, just not her conscious mind. Soon, a number of folks start to realize that Paul is the guy who’s showing up in their dreams. He doesn’t do anything — he’s just kind of there. And it’s not just one or two or a dozen people who are experiencing this “dream epidemic,” but hundreds. Overnight (literally), Paul becomes the most famous man in the world. Now people like those two hipster-courting publishers (Michael Cera and Kate Berlant) are interested in his long-in-the-works book. He’s respected by other academics. His wife is now hoping he shows up in her dreams as well. Preferably in that big David Byrne suit from Stop Making Sense that he wore one Halloween and she found so sexy.

You know things are bound to turn bad for Paul once a young woman (Dylan Gelula) goads him into recreating a sex dream he once graced during her sleeping hours. (This entire sequence results in what may be the greatest facial expression Cage has ever produced in a motion picture. The audience at the TIFF premiere broke out into spontaneous laughter and applause.) Sure enough, he begins to take on a more sinister presence in folks’ nightly screenings. Stabbings, surprise hammer attacks, assaults — it gets gnarly. Now no one is showing up to his class. Social engagements become uncomfortable. He’s asked to leave restaurants, because his fellow patrons are scared shitless of him. Paul did nothing to engender this reaction. The dream celebrity has become nightmare fodder. He’s unwelcome everywhere. Except France, his publisher notes, where the violence and sexual harassment he perpetrates in people’s heads doesn’t disqualify him from being a beloved figure.

Dream Scenario merely toys with nebulous digs at the ways society exiles those figures who are viewed as problematic. The movie doesn’t try to defend or prosecute the famous and powerful who are called out or incarcerated for crimes — Paul has not done anything except try to take advantage of his new-found fame to get published and dinner party invites — but suddenly, Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson are getting namedropped. Provocation is nothing new for Borgli; his previous cinematic poke-in-the-eye, Sick of Myself (2022), is all about the lengths one will go to distinguish themselves in today’s outrage-attention economy. The lack of a viewpoint here, however, is both a boon and bust: If this was an attempt to directly attack the “woke mob” mentality toward genuinely bad men, the satire wouldn’t work. Yet the idea of using such elements to tell the story of how fame becomes unwieldy and possibly prosecutorial courts toothlessness or distraction in a way that doesn’t service the film. It wants to have its hot-button-issue mentions and brush them into the background when they make things complicated, too.

None of which takes away from what Cage himself is doing with this cringe-comedy’s central character, and Dream Scenario‘s ultimate legacy will likely be that it adds another great eccentric take on misguided men to his personal canon. There are moments when you forget you’re watching an actor who’s never been less than unforgettable in even his weakest films; the baldness and beard are less a disguise and more of a way to push the character past his patented over-the-top persona. But it still allows him to indulge in some classic Cage tricks and tics, from that glorious nasal whine to Paul’s sputtering directionless anger, which ups the pathetic factor by 10. And somehow, you still sympathize with this guy, even when this nightmare of a situation brings out his worst instincts. This is an artist who refuses to rest on his lunacy-unchained laurels in terms of what he brings to someone this hapless and helpless. Give him someone like Matthews to inhabit, and you can feel how happy he is to be living his own personal dream of creative fulfillment.

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