Who Here Hasn’t Dreamed of Nicolas Cage?

Dream Scenario starts off as a funny, thoughtful look at how we all live in public today. Photo: Jan Thijs/A24

Some movies can be a little too clever for their own good. Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire. Luckily, a central performance by Nicolas Cage as a mild-mannered academic watching his dignity get demolished keeps us watching. He is both the movie’s greatest weapon and, at times, too good for it.

Cage plays Paul Matthews, an unremarkable professor of evolutionary biology who puts students to sleep and is regarded by most of his family as a nonentity at best and a nuisance at worst. A balding Everyman with a salt-and-pepper beard and a constant slightly befuddled expression, Paul is the very embodiment of anonymity. (In his lectures, he likes to talk about the ways that animals such as zebras try to blend in with the herd for survival.) Paul’s life starts to change when people — hundreds, thousands of them, most of them total strangers — start to see him wandering through their dreams. Whether they’re being attacked by alligators, sheltering from earthquakes, or being raptured into the sky, there Paul is, passively staring at them.

The world treats this as the crazy phenomenon that it is, and Paul soon becomes famous. Thankfully, Borgli mostly steers clear of nonsense movie science that might try to explain this metaphysical phenomenon. Paul’s strange appearances belong to the same cinematic tradition as Luis Buñuel’s trapped socialites and Bill Murray’s time-looping weatherman: twisted, inexplicable metaphors that tap into a modern state of unease. And while the director does shoot some of these dream sequences with deep shadows and a distant Lynchian thrum, he keeps the genre theatrics to a minimum; despite the absurdity of its conceit, Dream Scenario feels as if it takes place in the real world. At its best, the film captures that nagging feeling that we all live in public nowadays, that sense that even as we grow more isolated from one another, we’re more exposed than ever before.

Paul’s newfound celebrity curdles, however, when his avatar starts to take a more active role in people’s dreams. He’s no longer just watching. He’s now attacking, chasing, killing. And even though the real Paul has no control over what other people are dreaming, he becomes an outcast. His students stop coming to his lectures. He’s told his presence makes others uncomfortable. Patrons in restaurants angrily ask him to leave. Could he have brought this on himself? The change in dreams does occur after the married Paul has an agonizingly awkward sexual encounter with an assistant at a literary agency. Is his newfound dream villainy a kind of society-wide amortization of his submerged guilt?

Again, there’s something sickeningly familiar about the mood here, and Borgli captures another quality of life today: not just the possibility that our constant exposure could lead to our being vilified and depersoned at the drop of a hat, but also the worrying (and very human) feeling that we ourselves might have secretly done something to deserve it. Paul’s helplessness comes through vividly in the film, and few actors are better than Cage at taking a generalized sense of anxiety into the realm of existential farce. As he becomes a more disturbing presence in people’s lives, he also becomes a less likable figure in the film. At times, we feel as though we’re dreaming of Paul right along with the rest of the characters.

Borgli falters, however, when he makes his subtext text and turns Dream Scenario into a direct cancel-culture satire. That idea was already present. It’s one of many directions in which the film’s rich setup sends us. But by drilling down in such a specific manner, the writer-director doesn’t just narrow his scope, he reduces it. Then it becomes just a matter of name-checking Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and poking fun at safe spaces and whatnot. It’s not unfunny, to be sure, and Cage continues to be ruthlessly entertaining. But it’s hard not to feel like a beautiful, provocative premise is being sacrificed on the altar of a few topical yuks.