Dream Scenario first published by Sight and Sound, 9 November 2023
Review: As young Sophie Matthews (Lily Bord) sits watching her father Paul (Nicolas Cage) sweep autumn leaves, the glass surface of the table beside her suddenly shatters as a set of keys falls from the sky, and then more objects splash heavily into the pool. Sophie recoils with confusion and horror at the these irrational incidents, but what is even more peculiar is Paul’s non-response, even as his own daughter flies screaming into the air. This sequence at the beginning of Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario is the latest in a series of dreams that Sophie has had recently, all featuring her father as an absent presence, centred yet barely there at all – and while it is hardly unusual to dream about a family member, it will turn out that many others, even complete strangers, are also having their dreams gatecrashed by a conspicuous yet oddly inert Paul.
Paul is equally inert in real life. A tenured professor who has long been planning to write a book but shies from the actual work, Paul is a middle-aged, middle-class, bearded, balding family man with a loving wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and daughters Sophie and Hannah (Jessica Clement), and is described even by old friend Richard (Dylan Baker) as “actually not that memorable” and “kind of boring.” When being “a remarkable nobody” who “just shows up” in many people’s dreams suddenly elevates Paul to becoming what ridiculous branding agent Trent (Michael Cera) terms “the most interesting person in the world”, this unexpected celebrity is not for anything that Paul has actually done, but rather for a peculiar status he has involuntarily acquired in the collective subconscious of other people. Much as Paul had earlier tried to gain attributory credit in a paper that someone else had written, these are not even Paul’s own dreams which are now making his name. When Trent’s assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula) – seemingly the only person in whose dreams Paul plays an active, indeed sexual rôle – tries to get the actual Paul to reenact his part in her dream, she will be confronted, like an online dater, with the contrast between her dream man and Paul’s absurdly mundane reality.
Casting resonates here, often ironically. Where Cage typically plays flamboyant, eccentric action heroes, Paul is a dull schlub and “inadequate loser” marked precisely by inaction, all whining passivity and pathetic self-pity. Yet Cage is already an icon in the public consciousness, not unlike what Paul will become, and no doubt well used to the fickleness of fame. Once again Cage, as in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), dramatises the discrepancy between public image and private self, while the very fact that Paul is an evolutionary biologist, and that Trent imagines Paul wants to write about ‘plants’, alludes to Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. (2002), in which Cage plays a blocked screenwriter (and his dreamt-up, more active twin) struggling to adapt a book on orchids. Paul’s own longed-for book will finally be published, but in a form – edited, translated, even retitled by others – that has escaped his dreams for it into a more compromised reality.
Paul’s moment in the sun will darken as people’s dreams about him turn to nightmares, and he becomes a Freddy Krueger figure. Now one-time fans vilify the real Paul for the violent terror he unleashes in their dreams, and their traumas are retriggered by the mere sight of him. As people blame him for what he does in their dreams, or for real-life accidents that their own misplaced fear of him has caused, Paul gradually loses all sense of agency and everything he loves, so that he is left only to dream of the reality he once enjoyed.
When Paul refers to Janet’s neuroticism, he is clearly projecting. For in a sense, this entire film is Paul’s own dream scenario – an oneiric expression of male mid-life anxiety as well as a companion piece to the neurotic nightmare Beau Is Afraid (2023), whose writer/director Ari Aster serves as producer here. Borgli’s previous feature Sick of Myself (2022) darkly lampooned the (self-)destructive narcissism of the Internet age, and his Dream Scenario does something similar, presenting us with a snivelling, self-absorbed antihero, and pathologising his contradictory desires to blend in and to stand out (like the zebras on which he lectures). As Paul is all at once raised up and ruined by his own entirely unearned viral success, Borgli offers surreal, ultimately sad satire of 21st-century online exposure.
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Synopsis: When tenured professor Paul Matthews starts appearing in people’s dreams all around the world, the dull middle-aged family man suddenly acquires a viral celebrity, which just as quickly turns to notoriety as his oneiric appearances become more nightmarish. Entranced by his unearned fame, he will lose everything he values.
strap: Kristoffer Borgli’s oneiric satire stages the arbitrary fickleness of celebrity as individual and collective nightmare
Anton Bitel
