Review: Dream Scenario

Director: Kristoffer Borgli

Stars:  Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Dylan Gelula

It was only six short months ago that UK audiences were treated to Kristoffer Borgli’s darkly uncomfortable deconstruction of influencer culture Sick of Myself, imported semi-fresh from Norway, riding the wave of goodwill garnered by his countryman Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World. The two movies bore scant resemblance to one another, but that seemed immaterial to the marketing. Regardless, Borgli’s back again to continue his barbed dissection of our extremely-online lives with his English language debut Dream Scenario, produced by Ari Aster and its star Nicolas Cage (among others) and distributed by A24.

This time his target is cancel culture, which he takes aim at through an appreciably (to a point) throwback lens. Dream Scenario introduces us to underachieving tenured professor Dr. Paul Matthews (Cage), a balding failure in his own eyes who, while having a loving family, looks for the insult in every compliment and berates an old college acquaintance for supposedly plagiarising him. Paul has never been published, and that’s really all he wants, even though he hasn’t quite gotten to writing anything yet…

Things take a turn for Paul when, inexplicably, he starts guesting in the dreams of everyone around him. First locally – the news hilariously describes him blandly as ‘Area Man’ – and then across the states and eventually the globe. While Paul feigns modesty, he runs toward the attention, without pausing to consider what that might mean for his life. If anything he’s most concern by his apparent passivity in these dreams; he’s mostly just standing there by all accounts. Ever the introverted narcissist, he can’t help but panic over how this reflects on his own quasi-emasculated existence. His wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) wavers from concerned to exasperated, while his two daughters find the whole event simply embarrassing.

Why this is happening is a mystery to Paul, and that suits Borgli just fine. Through his quirky narrative conceit he is able to make his fallible but friendly lead character go viral. When Paul’s role in these dreams – over which he has no control – suddenly changes and becomes more sinister, he quickly finds himself confronted with a sizeable backlash. From his peers, from perfect strangers, from those closest to him.

Dream Scenario feels like its been inexplicably beamed into our present from 15 years ago, when lightly twee indie daydreams like this one were all the rage, spurred on in no small way by the creative What Ifs of Charlie Kaufman. Borgli’s formal impulses even seem keyed in on French music video maverick Michel Gondry, aping the alt-rock album cover sadness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, finding characters in quiet desperation mid-frame or in their cars, even bundling Paul up in his cumbersome duffel coat for roughly half the running time. Mia Sturup and Natalie Bronfman’s melodious score also tilts back to that era, echoing phrases found in Jon Brion’s music for Paul Thomas Anderson’s neurotic romcom Punch-Drunk Love.

While I’m citing highlights from the US indie scene’s former embrace of creative whimsy, those peak titles generated a whole clutch of less satisfying copies, and it is into this bracket of well-meaning, nice-enough but ultimately forgettable also-rans that Dream Scenario is likely to land. Cage has the comic chops and the insular tics to sell Paul beautifully (channelling a similar energy as he did for and as Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation.), and Borgli mounts his self-penned dream scenarios with aplomb. Coming from A24, this feels a little like EEAAO but without the speed addiction. Still, having posited a cancel culture situation where the victim is genuinely at no fault, he struggles to find an ending. Dream Scenario tilts toward the sci-fi during a weird and extended coda, but this isn’t really explored as well as it could have been and the film ultimately dead-ends, recalling – and this can’t be a coincidence – the bottom of Ari Aster’s own downward spiral of this year, Beau is Afraid.

Borgli’s sense of humour tends toward the dark and uncomfortable as those who caught (the superior) Sick of Myself can attest. Here he plays a little more broadly (one scene; two fart jokes), but still shows the propensity to go for the throat when it suits him. Dream Scenario probably could have used a little more of this edge, though one laments the idea of it spilling over into edgelord excess. Perhaps the funny he found is just enough.

In the end it feels as though we get a clear sense of where Borgli stands with regards to cancel culture (i.e. in opposition to it), as well as the prevalent cycle of ‘trauma cinema’ that has dogged particularly horror in recent years, but in asserting the innocence of his accused, he essentially bypasses the thornier end of the argument. Unlike TÁR Paul is just a victim of bizarre, even cosmic circumstances, and its hard not to find the end of the movie simply unsatisfying. It didn’t need answers – that wasn’t the point here – but it needed something.

Perhaps its my own fault. I couldn’t stop imagining him getting cosmetic surgery to look like someone else to finally free himself of mass vilification. Maybe John Travolta.