Dream Scenario - Review: A Role Most Actors Can Only Dream Of

 

Is there any modern actor with a career as fascinating as Nicholas Cage’s (“National Treasure,” “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”)? His works have spanned the overtly comedic to the dramatic to the horrific to the unintentionally comedic, and his latest role in “Dream Scenario” represents one of his most interesting to date. It helps that the film itself is a constantly fascinating, sometimes infuriating, work of modern science fiction realism. 

The film follows Cage as Paul Matthews, a college professor who one day suddenly begins appearing in the dreams of people all across the globe. Some of the dreams are simple, such as Paul walking through an otherwise more intense dream with no effect on the dreamers, but as he becomes more famous and the fame begins to influence him more, the dreams make dramatic turns; some sexual, some psychological, and some dark and violent. 

Cage is commanding throughout the film, and his performance is the entire focus of the film. It makes sense given the subject material, but he absolutely takes hold of the material and runs away with it, blending in feels of pity, anger, and melancholy for a performance that truly ends up being a highlight of his career. The rest of the cast, consisting of the likes of Julianne Nicholson (“August: Osage County,” “Mare of Easttown”), Michael Cera (“Superbad,” “Juno”), Tim Meadows (“Mean Girls (2004),” “The Goldbergs”), Dylan Baker (“Hunters,” “Murder One”), and Kate Berlant (“A League of Their Own (2022),” “Don’t Worry Darling”), is a collection of character actors playing things up against the eschewed straight man of Matthews to delightful effectiveness. 

Writer/director Kristoffer Borgli (“Sick of Myself”) keeps the existential dread and laughs flowing throughout the movie, balancing his high concept ideas with a thick layer of awkward comedy. It’s funneled through Cage’s pathetic portrayal of an everyman, but there’s also a lot of examinations on cancel culture and the generally fickle nature of the whims of the public and pop culture. It all works to an extent, not because it isn’t thought out, but because this is one of those movies that posits a lot of “what if” scenarios without ever giving any answers to any of them. 

Which does lead to an almost unfortunate side effect to the film: its concept is so fascinating that the fact that there isn’t a semblance of explanation is frustrating. No, a film does not need to explain its central concept, to spoon feed it to its audience, for it to be good. But the central idea here is so rich and fascinating that leaving it as unexplained as it is is maddening. Luckily, since the focus is entirely on Paul, it doesn’t sink the movie and it ends up being just a slight annoyance in the grand scheme of its overall ideas. There is also one particular moment that, while feeling just as purposefully uncomfortable as the rest of the film, feels also remarkably out of character for Paul and out of step with the rest of the film itself. It's just an uncomfortable and borderline gross moment that takes you out of the film. 

On the technical side, the film has a lovely chunky layer of film grain that overlays everything. This grain, coupled with the other splotchy and muted colors that come with Super 16m photography, helps to craft a sense of claustrophoby within Benjamin Loeb’s (“After Yang,” “Mandy”) cinematography. The odd musical score from Owen Pallett (“On the Count of Three,” “Alice, Darling”) further contributes to this feeling, and everything as a whole has a very odd, yet still extremely realistic vibe that feels quite unique. 

“Dream Scenario” is exactly that for any kind of actor. Cage gets to run away with a film based entirely around a morally dubious person put in an extraordinary circumstance that runs away with the world. It maintains a thick layer of awkward humor and irony throughout, bolstered by some fantastic technical elements, but does get a bit dogged down in a handful of narrative elements and, ironically, the genuine fascination of its central premise. I suppose, as the saying goes, you do always want to leave them wanting more. 4/5