Running into an ex is never easy. It’s a little more complicated when they tell you that you’ve been in their dreams lately.
For Paul Matthews, it’s the content of the dream that’s the troubling bit. When he runs into his ex during a night out, she relays the harrowing tale of her dream, in which her friend is hit by a car and terribly wounded. At some point, Paul shows up to the scene of the crime, standing there serene and silent as he observes the carnage in front of him.
Real Life Paul is a little affronted at the idea that even a version of himself he has no control over wouldn’t offer a helping hand. He voices this concern, and his ex looks at him with disbelief. “You’re still doing that?,” she asks. “Searching for the insult?”
In writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s fantastical black comedy “Dream Scenario,” he pins the downfall of fame on that very thing – the idea that we spend our lives constantly concerned with how we might have inadvertently wronged someone else, and when that tendency hits a massive scale, it’s easy to slowly drive yourself insane. And Paul (Nicolas Cage) is about to find out just how easy. You see, he’s not just showing up in his ex-girlfriend’s dreams, but in his daughter’s, in his students’, and even in the dreams of people he’s never met. In most of these dreams, as with the car accident scenario, he’s sort of just there. It doesn’t matter whether a student is being chased by a terrifying bloody monster, or his daughter is helplessly floating away into space – he never steps in. He simply exists.
Borgli tracks Paul’s journey over a surrealist version of the typical trajectory for the modern celebrity. Not so much that of movie stars or musicians, but rather that of regular people who – either by accident or through some algorithmic mechanism forced down our throats by Mark Zuckerberg and the like – go viral and instantly become part of our everyday lives, whether we want them there or not. As the dreams and their subsequent effect on Paul’s life evolves, his preoccupation with how others see him – his search for the insult – grows to an uncontrollable level. Historically, the public has always had expectations of the celebrities who entertain us. “Dream Scenario” is interested in how those expectations are inherently contradictory, and go haywire when foisted upon people who aren’t quite equipped to deal with them.
Dream Paul’s haplessness is in sync with that of Real Life Paul, who at one point is referred to by an acquaintance as “a remarkable nobody.” He’s a tenured professor who dreams of writing a book, but has no plans to actually start writing said book, instead choosing to spend his days fretting over perceived slights. When the dreams start, he sees them as an opportunity, a way to finally get a publisher for his nonexistent life’s work. There are multiple moments throughout the film where he and his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) say they don’t want this kind of attention, but the aura of stardom pulls at Paul much like it might at anyone. In the best stretch of the film, he takes a meeting with a PR firm run by Trent (Michael Cera) and Mary (Kate Berlant). The meeting starts off on a shaky note – Mary and Trent are more interested in using the dream phenomenon to sell Sprite rather than landing Paul a book deal – but just as Paul’s about to leave, the duo pivots, strategically manipulating Paul into thinking he wants something he’s actually vehemently opposed to. Cera and Berlant snappily play off of one another, representing opposite sides of the PR snake spectrum as they talk circles around their poor victim. Regular folks like Paul aren’t really meant for this world.
But the desire to be something other than regular pulls at Paul. That desire draws him to Molly (Dylan Gelula), a young assistant at the firm who is also the first person Paul has met having dreams about him where he isn’t taking a passive role. This is where the movie starts to turn on its axis, and Borgli infuses horror and comedy together with a twinge of cringe, capturing the awkward terror and frustration that engulfs Paul as his grasp on how other people perceive him spins out of control. If the dream is good, he can’t live up to expectations. If it’s bad, he can’t convince people he isn’t just like the monster they’ve encountered in their subconscious.
The surrealist nature of this scenario can be a difficult line for an actor to walk, but Cage finds Paul in the timbre of his voice and the set of his stride. What really sets Cage’s performance apart, however, are the physical changes he makes depending on whose subconscious he finds himself in. This is extremely apparent in the sequence with Molly, who asks Paul if he’ll act out her dream for her. The film cuts back and forth between Dream Paul and Real Life Paul, his confidence oscillating from evident to nonexistent from one frame to the next.
On paper, it’s easy to feel sympathy for Paul – he literally has no control over what’s happening to him – but Cage plays him with an inherent unlikability that complicates that feeling. Paul feels like he’s teetering on the edge of mania from the jump. He’s rife with insecurity, but has a subtle air of superiority about him, like he’s just waiting for the chance to tell somebody they’re wrong about something. He’s altogether pretty unpleasant, and this choice pulls the audience into the movie in a way that almost makes us party to Paul’s plight. When people’s reactions to Paul are so obviously outsized, it should be easy for us to call them out as such. Instead, our own notions about who he is get the best of us – much like they do every time we make snap judgments about TikTok stars, or the new Bachelor, or even someone like Nicolas Cage himself.
