NEVADA COUNTY, Calif. December 15, 2023 – Dream Scenario provides a great reason to go out to the movies this holiday season. Now playing at The Onyx in Nevada City, it weaves the fantastical story of Paul Mathews (Nicolas Cage), a biology professor and frustrated academic at a small Northeastern US college. Paul is a zero’s zero, or, as he says, “a remarkable nobody.” He’s a master of self-abnegation, boiling with resentment at his lack of recognition as he rails at the world and gets left off every guestlist in town.
Even his lovely wife, Janet (Juliane Nicholson), who offhandedly refers to him as an a**hole, may well have married him more out of pity than for love. Unsurprisingly, his teenage daughters, Hannah (Jessica Clement) and Sophie (Lily Bird), would rather hide in their Smartphones than share a dinner table with him.
Then, one night, for reasons never explained, Paul starts appearing in other people’s nightmares, starting with one of his daughters. He plays no part in the action, just wanders through as a passive spectator.
Nothing remarkable here, but when Paul later encounters a long-lost flame, Claire (Marnie McPhail), who’s also seen Paul in her dreams, the puzzle darkens. It’s one thing to be dreamt of by people we know, but another to be dreamt of by total strangers. The phenomenon spreads as students across the campus, faculty members, and people around the world step forward with reports of bald, dorky Paul Mathews wandering in the uncanny valley of their dreams with no more presence than a floor lamp.
Not everyone has these dreams; nor is there a discernible pattern to their occurrence. But Paul quickly goes viral, becoming a quasi-mythical figure in humanity’s collective unconscious, as once theorized by Carl Jung. Soon the world is at his door. (He even achieves cult status in France, a country known for embracing cultural rejects, as every Jerry Lewis fan knows).
Fame also brings trouble, but Paul’s inspires him to revive his long-dormant book on his theory of consciousness in nature. Searching for clout to get it done, he turns to a viral marketing firm, headed by Trent (Michael Cera), who initially proposes to insert Paul into a soft drink branding campaign, the first of many sinister marketplace incursions.
Things take a darker turn when one of the firm’s young execs, Molly (Dylan Gegula), admits to Paul that she’s been dreaming of him, too—not as a walk-on but as an aggressive midnight seducer. Aroused by the idea, she seduces Paul into acting out the scenario with her, with cringy results.
From there, a dangerous mutation emerges. Paul turns from a benign presence into a Freddy Krueger, a public danger rampaging through the world’s dreamscape. From there, it’s a short step to becoming another cancel culture target. Even his once-cherished anonymity can’t save him.
Dream Scenario is a brilliant mindbender that bears some resemblance to Being John Malkovich (1999), another highbrow concept film about minds under occupation.It’s not a knee-slapping farce but a precisely pitched blend of magical realism and extremely dark comedy of very modern, and very bad, manners that engages and delights.
Wearing three hats as editor, writer, and director, Norwegian Kristoffer Borgli has woven a grimly funny tale in which the border between our private dreams and our public lives turns dangerously porous. He’s envisioned the Internet, social media, and AI as the main villains, indulging our worst instincts to no one’s benefit. The freedom we find in our dreams comes under attack by the mores of society and demands of the marketplace, with Paul Mathews the chief victim of the new totalitarianism.
Borgli directs in the straightforward manner associated with magic realism, where uncanny events occur without underlying explanations, simply as matters of fact. The dream sequences blend bizarre and prosaic details, such as the sound of footsteps (a feature absent from my dreams). As an eerie stroke, he inserts a flickering effect at the start to remind us we’re entering a dream and then repeats it as though to wake us up. (Movies are also dreams, but collective ones, with popcorn.)
Borgli’s cinematographer Benjamin Loeb paints both waking and dream worlds in similar tones of dark-grained colours and low-key lighting that further blur the borders between waking and dreaming, keeping things off balance. Composer Owen Pallet drops in eerie solo piano passages at various points that underline Paul’s deepening isolation.
Like Beau is Afraid (2023) whose director, Ari Aster, is an executive producer here, Dream Scenario is a riff on the Story of Job, the Biblical allegory of one man’s relentless, undeserved suffering. But where Aster took three long hours to make his point, Borgli makes his in 100 minutes. He also bestows a welcome mercy with a haunting, poignant ending that sticks in the mind and heart.
The screenplay bursts with ideas and implications, maybe more than it can handle. A few questions are left hanging, such as the nature of Paul’s dream world, which we visit only once. Nor, at any point, do we see Paul seek outside help once the walls start closing in. The more openly satiric moments may well grow dated with passing time.
The cast is great from top to bottom. As Janet Mathews, Julianne Nicholson is a standout as she expresses Janet’s wavering between love and outright rejection with fine nuance. But Dream Scenario belongs above all to Nicolas Cage as Paul Mathews. I’ve never been a huge Nic Cage fan, mostly finding him an unappealing showboat. As Paul Mathews, though, he restrains his campy tendencies with a commanding, sympathetic performance that lifts this film into one of the best dream scenarios you’ll find this holiday season.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark.