Dream Scenario
“Dream Scenario” starts as a dark comedy before transitioning to a horror film. Neither tone really mixes, and I think that’s an important part of this film’s impact. Another part of that impact is the performance by Nicolas Cage that starts as an average man thrust in the spotlight before finding the complication nature of celebrity to be a nightmare. The way this film operates is to bait us with a taste of something that, deep down, I think a lot of us would want before giving us a look of the worst case scenario. This will be a difficult film for me to shake.
Paul Matthews (Cage’s character) is a very mild-mannered college professor. We see him teaching his class- which has people uninterested; we see him with his family; and we see him frustrated by a former colleague who seems to be stealing his ideas for their own writing. We first see him raking leaves in the backyard as one of his daughter’s sits at a table; when she starts to have things happen to her, though, he does nothing. It turns out it’s a recurring dream for Sophie (Lily Bird), and she’s not the only person seeing Paul in their dreams. Old flames, students, and strangers from around the world also find themselves with Paul in their dreams. Paul is unsure what to make of it, but he soon leans into the celebrity. When he goes to pitch a book, though, what was a dream takes a more twisted turn.
Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s approach to this premise as, essentially, two halves of a whole story, with both halves being different in tone and sensibilities, is going to make it very divisive, but also why I kind of love it, as well as personal reasons I will get to shortly. There are hints of Charlie Kaufman-esque surrealism in this film, and I’m sure that is part of what drew Cage to the material, but you can also see why Ari Aster was inspired to produce it. It’s a big swing for Borgli to essentially lean into just having one part of the moving be one tone and another part in another tone, but I think it plays into reality in a way that a movie which goes all-in on being a true tonal hybrid would, because often in life, what starts out as a comedy can lead to horror. All the while, Cage is game for everything the film asks of him, and he is the constant throughout both tones the film takes, though he has great performances to bounce off of from the likes of Julianne Nicholson as his wife, Janet; Bird and Jessica Clement as his daughters; Tim Meadows as the Dean where he teaches; Dylan Baker as a “friend” who doesn’t invite them to his famous dinners; Dylan Gelula as Molly, an assistant at an agency whose dreams of Paul involve more than his passively being there; and Michael Cera as Trent, the head of the agency who sees Paul as a hip spokesperson for the zeitgeist.
Fifteen years ago, I was in an emotional crisis in a lot of areas, not just in terms of professionally- feeling I should have been doing more- but romantically. It led to a lot of bad choices that fractured friendships and gave me more anxiety than I needed, at the time. Watching “Dream Scenario,” I thought back to that time watching as Paul goes through a situation where he starts as an ordinary schlub, then his “celebrity” which he hopes to build off of, before a choice he makes seemingly turns his entire life into a emotional meltdown. What I like about the film is that it asks us to examine our own ideas of whether Paul brought the turn on himself, or if he’s the victim of people projecting their anxieties onto him. I think a case can be made for both. Like I did, Paul does not react well to what happens, and it costs him his friends and family. I caught myself before the point of no return; I won’t say whether Paul does, but I definitely felt connected to him through to the end.
The third act of this film is going to be almost as controversial as anything in the film. I think the reason things turn for Paul are fairly clear- it’s all about actions he takes- and I love how the film turns its gaze more fully on the society as a whole that embraced Paul, and learned all the wrong lessons from it. It reveals the film as a social satire, and while I’m not sure it fully works, the emotional arc of Paul does. “Dream Scenario” is more than just a genre film that resonates with me; it’s a reflection on how life can turn on us in an instant, and inspire us to take action in ways that may seem valuable to us, but also have the potential to ruin us if we don’t recognize the self-centered way we sometimes pursue things that matter, but may not be right for us at the moment. When we try and force ourselves on society, rather than allow our importance in it to come naturally, it can wreck us, and devalue what we have to offer. I empathize with Paul Matthews in this film because I’ve felt like him, but I have enough personal awareness to see what he can’t when it comes to how he behaves when a unique situation arises for reflection.
