Dream Scenario

Dreamageddon!

Dream Scenario
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
USA A24 2023
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This one has some spoilerage in
terms of discussing the concept and where it goes.

A brief shout out now to new movie Dream Scenario, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. This one stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a professor at a university who has never really done much with his life and never gotten around to writing his book... instead he resents that others are profiting from the same field of research as he and he comes across as a bit of a non-person, in many ways. That is until he starts invading other people’s dreams, through no fault of his own. After an opening sequence where we witness a dream experienced by one of his daughters (and I don’t think that’s particularly a spoiler... it was obvious to me from the first shot that we were in a dream) he hears how he was just a passive person in the dream... not responding to what was going on around him as anything special and not really helping out. He is a little concerned, after hearing this, that he’s seen like this in real life by both his two daughters and his wife (played by Julianne Nicholson).

However, after a few more scenes it turns out that a lot of people have suddenly started dreaming about him, from all over the world and that his persona in these dreams, one of someone who is just a casual, uninterested observer, is the common denominator (for a while). Paul becomes an overnight media sensation and is highly sought after as advertising fodder for high profile creative companies such as one run by Trent, played by Michael Cera (in the kind of role I’ve not seen him do before but he’s very good in this) and for various interviews. However, there’s a point in the movie where one person he meets has a dream where he’s not as passive but, when the young woman in question tries to co-opt him into reliving her personal dream fantasy of him, it goes kinda wrong and, suddenly, from that point on... things change.

Suddenly, Paul is seen killing and terrorising various people in their dreams and, all of a sudden, nobody wants to be around him... this affects his job, his wife’s job and various other things in his life. Even Paul himself is, as I kinda knew he would be once the movie started going down this path, haunted by himself in an aggressive dream fantasy and suddenly, the film shifts gears and becomes all about the bizarrely modern trend of ‘cancel culture’ and how it affects the innocent victims as much as people who have truly done anything wrong.

And it’s a nice little movie. It almost outstays its welcome in the last quarter of an hour or so when it takes another turn into what happens when the whole phenomenon stops but, it doesn’t quite wrongfoot itself and the way it ends is as nice a way as any (and I was waiting for that oversized novelty Talking Heads jacket to make an appearance in the film since an early reference to it). There are also some nice things going on technically, such as an early scene where Paul is recording a dinner conversation on his phone and the dinner is cross cut with him listening to the recording in his car. At some point in the sequence, the audio properties of the recording of the conversation juxtapose the images of the actual conversation and we then subtly shift, perhaps, into Paul’s visual memories of the conversation as exhibited by that shift in audio quality, which is visually no different whatsoever to the actual scene as it plays out. Which is a really nice thing to do with it, I thought.

In terms of tone, the film is hard to pin down but it reminded me a little bit of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries but leaning heavily into Woody Allen’s homage to that film in Deconstructing Harry. And then, towards the end, there’s a Philip K. Dick kind of epilogue to the whole story which brings it almost into the realm of soft science fiction. And yeah, a short review of the film, for sure but, that’s me done with Dream Scenario, I think. It’s an interesting look at the way an innocent victim’s life can be turned upside down by events which are completely nothing to do with that person but still invite the wrath of the world to your doorstep. An interesting film for lovers of cinema, I would say. Very much worth a look.