Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Check out our extensive review slate of TIFF 2023, revisit our official preview and complete archives of prior editions.
Well, I guess the second time really is the charm. After the hyper-meta and aggressively shitty Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a movie that was tailor-made for Discord gif reactions, Nicolas Cage has finally taken his status as a cultural memetic force and put it to relatively good thematic use. The Ragin’ Cage spent all week at TIFF talking about his bizarre fascination with early viral videos that presented out-of-context scenes from his movies – mostly of him freaking the fuck out, as one of the video titles would have it – and how that fed into his great performance in Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, in which Cage’s nebbish professor character unwittingly (and unwillingly) haunts the dreams of a decent subset of the human race. Rod Serling must be smiling in whatever ironic heaven he’s been placed in, somewhere in the Fourth Dimension.
What’s interesting is how delayed the “Be careful what you wish for” message is in the film’s structure. When it first starts to happen, Paul (Cage), a professor of evolutionary biology, is at a kind of low point. To put it plainly, he is boring, being a genteel family man and hapless pushover who can’t even assert himself when it comes to calling out a former colleague for plagiarism. One day, he wants to publish a book, thinking that it’ll give him the validation he wants so badly, but it’s not a major focus for him. He has a happy domestic life, with a loving wife (Julianne Nicholson) and two daughters, and that might be enough. Until his daughter describes to him a nightmare that she had, in which Paul just did nothing as random objects rained down from the sky around her. Everyone thinks it’s just a normal weird dream, and mostly they joke about how boring Paul is, ribbing which he takes in decent spirits, even if it hurts deep down inside.
Then, one fateful night, things begin to drastically change. People around the city begin to recognize him from somewhere out in the ether. An ex-girlfriend runs up to him to let him know that he is in her dreams, leading his wife to jealously. Most of his students start to tell him that they dreamed about him. Paul should be terrified, but he isn’t. Instead, he’s just curious, engaging his students in very fun discussions about their dreams as a way of data collection and submitting to media interviews with the local news. It’s harmless, after all – he never does anything. He even meets with a New York-based marketing team, whose lead account executive (Michael Cera) believes that he can quite literally insert fucking Sprite ads into the dreams of the unsuspecting, provided that Paul’s holding the can. But what happens when those dreams turn into aggressive nightmares? What happens to Real Paul when Dream Paul begins to murder people in their dreams, and they start to fear him?
As much as A24 wants you to read the words “Ari Aster” and assume the worst (aside from his “If you fuck, you gonna die” stuff), Dream Scenario slots pretty nicely in Borgli’s filmography, being an English-language (and slightly higher budget) take on the themes that he’s spent his short career exploring. There is, of course, the corrosive element of fame (which he tackled in Sick of Myself, an art world satire that got buried by its Norwegian counterpart The Worst Person in the World’s success last year) and the foibles of modern marketing (2017’s Drib, which will live in particular infamy for how its own publicists clogged up my inbox when it released). These elements are well-fused, and for a while, the combination of Cage, high-level satire, low-level scatological comedy (the Scandinavians do it better than anybody else), and Borgli’s interpretations of the various dreams that Paul appears in makes Dream Scenario the kind of project that you’d wish A24, in their quest for meme glory, would continue to greenlight instead of chasing down TikTokers.
Once the Book of Job section of the film takes off, Paul’s life is thoroughly dismantled by forces out of his control (though after he commits one moral error that proves, at least in the universe of the film, that the Old Testament God never really left the building), Borgli defaults to some of the shittier aspects of culture war “realism,” in which Cera tries to get him on Rogan or Tucker as a way to somehow salvage his brand, and his students begin to have a pathological fear of him even entering the classroom. Out comes the “Gen Z are snowflakes” and “cancel culture” stuff, which is all well and good if it weren’t put in this specific film’s tonal stew: Paul’s scared and whatnot, but he’s never been this bitter, even if he resents his pupils for taking an interest in him only when he became relatable-famous. Again, this third act regression-to-the-mean wouldn’t feel so bad if it didn’t feel so obvious and boring, and there’s a moment, right after what seems to be the film’s climax, in which I genuinely feared that the movie would end on the kind of note that would instantly sour so much of Cage’s good work here.
But Borgli recovers and steers the film into a smooth and surprisingly moving landing, paying off one of the film’s best gags with a meaningful callback. If the ending really is a given narrative’s conceit, this one is swell, being one that sees Cage and his director fully sync up and dig into Paul’s emotions as established early on, retaining a sense of character continuity that Borgli occasionally forgets about in the sweep of the plot’s expanding scope. Yet Cage does his best to ground things in a kind of realistic and removed sweetness – his graying beard, balding head, and sweater-vested paunch evoking both the nightmare world of a curdled memory of a sitcom and the earnest plainness of someone dearly loved and yet perpetually undervalued. Cage’s strange tenderness is one of his most undervalued assets as a performer, which is odd given just how long it’s been apparent – there’s a throughline from Birdy to Adaptation to Mandy to Dream Scenario – of just how aggressively human Cage is when it comes to realizing his characters in all of their infamies and glories. This is the kind of tender portrait Cage deserves at this point of his career – a man grappling with the imaginary image that folks have of him but using it to further himself toward catharsis.