Dream Scenario movie review: (un)likely boogeyman – FlickFilosopher.com

The term “Cage rage” is used, approvingly, by fans of the over-the-top acting style that Nicolas Cage sometimes deploys in his film performances, usually in movies that feature extreme violence and explore deranged personalities: there’s lots of unhinged fury, often drenched in blood, as his eyes bulge and he screams furiously. Ethan Hawke, in a 2013 AMA on Reddit, praised Cage’s approach: “He’s the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting; he’s successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism.”

Indeed, Cage told Indiewire in a 2018 interview that his technique is “all very thought out and carefully planned,” an expression of his “abstract and more ontological fantasies with film performance.” So the actor finds it “frustrating” and a “disservice” to the films and his work that those performances are often detached from their cinematic contexts and edited by fans into clip collections, or supercuts: long montages of, well, Cage rage. These amuse fans. They don’t amuse Cage.

So it’s easy to see what may have drawn Cage to Dream Scenario, and why he’s so profoundly moving in it. I only wish the film was more deserving of what he’s doing here.

Cage (Sympathy for the Devil, Renfield) plays extremely mildmannered college professor Paul Matthews, a nobody of a man who, for mysterious and unexplained reasons, suddenly starts appearing in the dreams of people all over the world. People he doesn’t know and who have no way of knowing him. He doesn’t do anything in the dreams, just observes whatever surreal oddness is occuring. The phenomenon itself is beyond dreamlike oddness, to say the least, and once it becomes known that the strange man everyone is seeing in their dreams is the same individual, an actual real person, Paul becomes a bit of a media sensation, to his baffled but also, maybe, secretly pleased surprise.

This is not a Cage-rage performance — quite the opposite. Cage is so naturalistic, so down-to-earth that he frequently and completely appropriately induces cringes in the viewer with Paul’s utterly human awkwardness and his banal desperation to be liked. His work here is comedic in the driest, subtlest, most nakedly painful way, very much akin to his brilliant turn in 2002’s Adaptation. And it becomes even more so when “Paul’s” benign presence in people’s dreams turns nasty and violent, and suddenly this harmless schlub has become a menacing figure lodged in the collective subconscious, one that also terrifies those dreamers in a way that carries over to their waking minds.

Now, it’s explicit that Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli wants to examine modern concepts of fame, especially when it is unexpected and unwanted. “How does it feel to go viral?” one of Paul’s students asks. (This is Borgli’s third feature, and his first wholly in the English language. His 2022 film Sick of Myself and his 2014 short “Internet Famous” both appear to consider similar themes; I haven’t seen either, though Sick is high on my watchlist.) But where the filmmaker takes it from here never quite gelled for me. Metaphors don’t have to be perfect analogs to be effective, of course, but it seems to me that even unexpected and unwanted fame is the result of overt actions on someone’s part, even if they never wanted those actions to be made quite so public. Just because, say, a surreptitiously shot video of an angry Karen demanding to speak to a manager went viral doesn’t mean that it’s not an accurate representation of her behavior.

But poor Paul! People are suddenly terrified of him — are, ahem, cancelling him, even — because of something that isn’t real, that he didn’t do, and that bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything he would do. Paul wouldn’t mind some recognition for his work: his field is the evolutionary biology of insects, and he has a book about “antelligence” that he’d love to write and get a little bit famous for, but he’s so ineffectual that the book is only the germ of an idea right now. Paul isn’t even a threat to his own procrastinating ineptitude, never mind to anyone else.

Cage crafts a palpable misery in Paul’s, well, stuckness in his own life, in his befuddled benign neglect of himself, and in his own clueless lack of self-awareness. This is a horror movie in which the horror is the protagonist’s own insipid inability to follow through on his ambitions, which he probably can’t even see. And there are extra layers of horror for a viewer who may see him- or her- or themself in that incredibly common aspect of Paul’s personality. Borgli and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb add to that heavy weight with a carefully studied atmosphere of intentional drabness: Paul’s reality isn’t merely mundane, it’s muted and gray.

On the other hand, the violent dreams Paul appears in are practically parodies of memeified “Cage rage.” Surely the actor’s own displeasure with how his work is sometimes received fuels his portrayal of both dream-Paul’s outrageous violence and actual-Paul’s bewilderment at how his dream “audience” responds.

But that’s tangential, behind-the-scenes color, and not anything to do with what Dream Scenario is actually about. And, sadly, the longer Dream Scenario goes on, the less confident Borgli is about any of it. The only vibe I was getting — and this snuck up on me until it felt like an unpleasant certainty — is one not of the vagaries of fame but the terror too many men have now that our society is beginning to hold them to account for their bad behavior, such as with the #MeToo movement, and how we’re starting to talk about rape culture as a thing to be deconstructed and dismantled.

Of course, hashtag–not all men. Not Paul! He’s harmless, as we can plainly see. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, truly. And yet people — men as well as women — are suddenly afraid of him merely because they imagined him doing something awful. It’s not right. It’s unfair!

And it is unfair. Paul doesn’t deserve what he gets here. People may behave strangely in dreams, but the way people around Paul — such as his wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson: I, Tonya, Black Mass) — react in the dull mundanity of his real world ultimately makes little sense and feels wildly implausible. Not that fictional characters always have to deserve what they get… but what they get should at least make a sort of narrative sense. But here, either the calculus of Borgli’s tale is off and he derailed his own intriguing concept because he didn’t know where to take it… or he really is saying, “Won’t someone think of the trauma men are going through now that women have stopped pretending we don’t have good reasons to be afraid of some of you?”

Alas, it isn’t mere nightmares that have made women finally speak our truths, and even given that, no man is getting “cancelled” — not that that even actually happens, certainly not like it does for Paul here — for no reason whatsoever. Men who have done bad things are, very occasionally, having to face consequences. Plenty of men are still getting away with their crimes. Innocent men are not being targeted, unfairly or otherwise.

I haven’t been a fan of Cage’s “Cage-rage” performances; I’ve characterized them in the past as “indulging tropes of toxic masculinity,” though I might reconsider that in light of Hawke’s praise. But what we see in Dream Scenario, which looks a helluva lot like it’s straining to build up a strawman siege of poor Paul? That is pretty toxic.

more films like this:
• Being John Malkovich [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Inception [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BFI Player UK]