"Dream Scenario" [Philadelphia Film Festival 2023]: Nic Cage plays boring so well in this intriguing, wryly funny dark comedy

Dream Scenario (2023)

Is Nicolas Cage popping up in your dreams again? Well, he definitely will be after “Dream Scenario,” an oddball, wryly hilarious dark comedy if there ever was one. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli has two films out this year, and this is his English-language follow-up to “Sick of Myself,” a cutting, cruelly funny, and compelling character piece about a narcissistic pathological liar desperately competing for sympathy and validation to be a victim. Making for a great compare-and-contrast companion, “Dream Scenario” is about the least interesting person in the world who then finally gets noticed for being passive.

Casting Nicolas Cage as a remarkably unremarkable nobody is the first masterstroke. He plays the very blah Paul Matthews, a tenured college professor and a family man with a wife, Janet (a superb Julianne Nicholson), and two daughters in leafy suburbia. One morning, Paul’s daughter tells him that she had a dream where he was in it but didn’t do anything. After that, people from his past, his students, and random strangers begin seeing Paul in their dreams — again, he’s just walking by and not doing anything of note (i.e. not helping during an earthquake or the threat of a crocodile). Paul becomes something of a celebrity, even being seen in a young woman’s sex dream, until that fame sours. The collective dreams later turn into nightmares where the dreamers are scared for their safety when Paul, in real life, enters the room.

The concept is so intriguing that the film can’t help but eventually paint itself into a corner. Even so, “Dream Scenario” is surprising for a long time and finds new avenues into familiar ideas with the weirdness of Charlie Kaufman and the chilly, formal aesthetic of Yorgos Lanthimos. Much of that has to do with Borgli’s blackly comic tone and the crisp but austere photography by Benjamin Loeb. Leaving us laughing but feeling off-kilter, the dreams that people have begin normally with a bizarre, surreal, often viscerally violent tweak. A Talking Heads suit even figures into someone’s dream. Borgli finds a way into the nature of fame and celebrity, the dichotomy between reality and dreams, and the alienation created by cancel culture. Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com

Grade: B +

"Dream Scenario" (102 min.) screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. A24 released the film on November 22, 2023.