Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a perfectly normal, perfectly forgettable figure.  A tenured professor in biological evolution at the local university, his students endure his lectures with little vigor.  The man finds – literal – overnight stardom when in conversation with multiple friends and colleagues, they discover that they have all been dreaming about Paul.  Not in any specific way, but just that Paul would show up somewhere in their dreams.  As this phenomenon takes hold of the nation, Paul revels in his newfound fame, but when the dreams begin to take a darker turn, the public that once adored him will quickly turn. 

Kristoffer Borgli debuted his horror comedy, Dream Scenario, from A24, at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was in contention for the Platform Prize.  The Cage-starrer was originally being developed by Ari Aster with Adam Sandler in the lead role, but Borgli led the film into possibly more meta-territory by replacing the star. The 102-minute film starts off light and funny enough as a dark, absurdist comedy, but as it begins to develop into a satire, the joke quickly wears thin and Borgli tries the audience’s patience with a deeply misguided approach to his thesis.   

Leaning into the meme, Cage is playing Paul as much as he is playing himself in this film to varying degrees of success depending on where in the narrative he is.  It is not that the performance ever falters or goes into an exceptionally strange territory, but rather he is saddled with a script that totally devolves in the second half leaving him to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it within the moment.  The role requires a good bit of self-defeating and Cage is up to the challenge as he takes loss after loss in the second half of the film.  His brand of comedy suits the tone of the film well enough to keep audiences engaged, but it is all very surface level and more laughing along at Cage and his antics instead of at Paul the character. 

Focusing on what works, the film opens incredibly strongly with a zany concept that we get to figure out along with Paul.  There is no helping laughing at Paul as he pops his head into Brett’s (Tim Meadows) office, the dean of the college and a longtime friend of the professor, and asks if the man had been dreaming of him, totally out of context and when asked, it is shrugged off and left at that.  Borgli gets to have some fun in the edit here showing the absurd dreams that Paul has wandered his way into; a car crash, a woodland chase, alligators… in the house!  As the world is being established and the rules, what few there are, are being established is when the film is at its most lighthearted and fun. 

Once Paul becomes a sensation, he is poached by the new-age marketing company Thoughts?, and it is here where the film begins to falter.  In a meeting with Trent (Michael Cera), the scruffy-faced CEO, Borgli slowly begins to reveal the thesis of his film: under modern capitalism, nothing is sacred, not even your thoughts. The premise is simple, put up ads of Paul with a can of Sprite so that people will dream about Sprite.  Cera does well in the role and is affable enough, but the scene drags and the humor begins to cycle and Borgli is not nearly as damning of these new-age “disruptors” as the points he is trying to make demands.  After the meeting, Paul connects with Molly (Dylan Gelula), one of the marketing leads, at a local bar and Dream Scenario begins to take a much darker turn after she confesses to having extremely erotic dreams about Paul and wants to reenact them back at her apartment.  If awkward and uncomfortable were the goals – and to a certain degree, they were – the entire sequence is a knockout success, but it undeniably runs entirely too long so audiences can be forgiven for starting to check out because the script loses its charm and its humor. 

The tonal shift continues and the third act is downright nasty.  It teeters into a skewering account of cancel culture as Paul begins to grow violent in other people’s dreams and they petition to get him removed from his position at the college. He yells at the students after they defaced his car, the altercation all caught on camera, and he quickly becomes the neighborhood pariah.  If Borgli is seeking to lampoon the concept of cancel culture, he has a clear misunderstanding of it and any nuance which he may have had is lost in the smugness of it all.  To be generous, the opening satiric argument of Dream Scenario does work well as Borgli teases out the concept that people can be canceled for thoughts – or, rather, dreams – that others have had about them, however, the story becomes so unwieldy as he tries to balance the various plot lines, and in doing so, the unfocused third act takes away the bite of his thesis.  Because of this, his arguments against cancel culture come off more as just one of any number of things on a rambling list of the screenwriter’s grievances. 

The other major point that Borgli is trying to make is a cry against the prevalence of advertisements, and it also starts off strong before falling apart.  Dream Scenario has almost a 4th act in the form of its extended coda revealing that there is new technology that allows influencers to travel into other people’s dreams to peddle their goods.  Again, it is a great kernel of an idea that is far more supported by the film given that earlier Sprite was looking to do the same thing with Paul, but the technology just was not there.  Borgli is not kind to the influencers and treats them as D-rate snake oil salesmen, but as he explores this concept, he reveals a fatal flaw in the narrative.  He has no idea how to wrap this plot up, stating point blank that they have no idea why or how Paul entered into everyone’s dreams, yet somehow, they were able to harness that phenomenon to create this dream technology to use as advertising.  It is frustrating that he does not even respect his audience enough to work out this plot point, and instead of just ignoring it and leaving audiences to accept it as a strange thing that happened, he highlights that he basically rushed this script through to a finish without thought or care about the inner working of the plot.   

Dream Scenario, while it may be a touch harsh, is a real waste of the audience’s time.  Borgli bit off more than he could chew, writing, directing, and editing the film instead of building out a crew so that he could better focus on certain aspects of the film that he otherwise swept under the rug and hoped no one would notice.  Cage’s magnetism is enough to mask much of this in the first half, but as he grows angrier, audiences begin to miss the pathetic almost Zanni-styled character of the first act.  The film has a great hook, but as it is explored further, it begins to fall apart.  While it is not fair to hold the chaos the media landscape suffered in 2023 against the film, but hearing Twitter referred to by name, or the potential to rebrand Paul as someone who would be able to mount his recovery tour on Tucker Carlson, makes the film feel dated right out of the gate further eroding the goodwill of audiences to forgive the looser plotting of the third act.  These outside forces aside, there is no denying that the script is far too broad and is so unsure of what exactly it wants to be that audiences will struggle to stay engaged until the very end.