Nicolas Cage is at his Cage-iest in twisty tale of dreams run amok
Dream Scenario
Starring Nicolas Cage
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Dec. 1
Sigmund Freud said that dreams are “the most profound when they seem the most crazy.” The late, great psychoanalyst has been gone for some 90 years, but I suspect he might have some thoughts, if he were still around, about Nicolas Cage popping up in other people’s snoozy noggins.
Cage’s character in Dream Scenario, a rumpled college biology professor “nobody” named Paul Matthews, is as surprised as everyone else when he finds out people—thousands of them—have been seeing him in their dreams. He always appears as a benign figure passing through, not speaking or doing much of anything; it’s like he’s photo-bombing their nocturnal Instagram feeds. As reports of his invasive dreams make news, he becomes a media sensation and goes viral on the internet. Nobody knows why it’s happening, but suddenly, the whole world knows about Paul, and he likes it.
“So, I’m finally cool?” he asks his two teenage daughters. “I wouldn’t go that far,” his oldest tells him.
The movie drops in a lot of ideas—astral projection, the Mandela Effect, a collective subconscious, dream travel—as everyone tries to figure out what’s going on. Does it have anything to with Paul’s scholarly interest in the complex “herd mentality” of ants, or the way zebras visually meld into larger groups as an adaptive survival strategy? Where does the art-rock band Talking Heads, and David Byrne’s big, oversized suit, fit in? Can Paul capitalize on his newfound celebrity status as “the most interesting man in the world”?
Things take a turn for the worse when his presence in dreams abruptly becomes more involved, much darker and far more troubling. One young woman (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Dylan Gelulla) wants Paul to reenact in person her recurring erotic dreams in which he seduces her. Other people have nightmares, with Paul appearing as a menacing, stalking, traumatizing figure. Even he begins have nightmares in which he’s terrorized by…himself. His students think he’s a monster; one of his daughters tells him her friends “call you Freddy Krueger.”
With his world crumbling around him, Paul goes on the defensive about his dream double appearing in everyone’s nocturnal reveries. “That man,”, he says emphatically in an online video, “is not me!”
Crazy, right? It gets even crazier when a tech company invents a gizmo, based on Paul’s “dream epidemic,” that lets users control which dreams they want to “visit,” and what messages—or products—they want to plug in dreamers’ minds. (And it comes with a “no nightmare guarantee.”) As Paul navigates the darker flip side of his short-lived fame, he becomes an almost tragic figure, a victim of something he can’t and couldn’t control, something he doesn’t understand.
It’s a dark comedy, but it has flourishes of horror and sci-fi, like an edgier Twilight Zone or an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror. (One of the producers is Ari Aster, who directed the unsettling mind-benders Midsommer, Hereditary and Beau is Afraid.) Cage’s Paul Matthews fits in snugly with the impressively broad range of other “unconventional” characters the eclectic actor has played in “crazy” films like Adaptation, Pig, Ghost Rider, Renfield, The Wicker Man and Mandy.
But this crazy-train tale also tunnels into your head with some pointed, thought-provoking satire about the undesirable side effects of fame, the addictive nature of technology and the sublime mysteries of the mind, where ids and egos sometimes run free, or run amok. What are dreams? Are we responsible for them? What do our nocturnal wanderings say about us? Sigmund Freud might even have called Dream Scenario “profound.”
It’s just too bad he’s not around to see it. I’d sure like to hear what he’d have to say.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 