DREAM SCENARIO - THOUGHTS?

A 144-minute-long Nicolas Cage starrer psychosis punctuated by several fever dreams, Dream Scenario is one of those absurd pieces of modern, abstract art- a man punching a hole in a bottom-most bucket full of sand, eventually causing the vertical line of several other buckets stacked above it falling within a minute. Most of the following applause is for the man, not the claimed art piece. The man, in this case, is Nicholas Cage, which would make the progressively bizarre plotline of this film swinging you between profundity and concern, the buckets.?

Paul Matthews (played by Cage) is a tenured professor of Evolutionary Biology at an American University. He has a wife (played by Julianne Nicholson), two kids, and what would qualify for the better, a pretty average life. What turns this average life upside down is when he starts appearing in people’s dreams around the world. This bizarre phenomenon brings the kind of virality he was neither prepared for nor knew what to do with. What seems to start as the indulgence of the sweet feast of fame (“I wish people would dream about me”) turns into a literal nightmare even before he’s able to make sense of it. Getting swooped into the whirlwind of this crisis disguised as a quest to self-fulfilment, where he has no control over anything whatsoever, and the stakes are as high as what the entire world thinks of you, Dream Scenario pretty much nails the first half with constructing the metaphor of fame, cancel-culture, and mass media at large.?

What stood out in this dark comedy for me like ‘the neck of a zebra away from the herd’, was Cage’s performance. Paul Matthews as a character can be described as a very awkward, flimsy, intelligent yet gullible man who often seems to question his worth based on people’s perception of him. The way his otherwise disrespectful students think of him as a ‘cool’ person post his dream-trend buzz seems to validate him not in a way it would validate someone sure of himself. It seems to do more than flatter, almost enhancing his shaky sense of self. We see a glimpse of this even when he meets one of his ex-girlfriends for coffee presuming she still has feelings for him, in his disappointment when he finds that not to be the case.?

There are moments where you feel for him, still. The heartfelt, almost profound catharsis when he breaks down on a live stream, where the absurdity of it all finally gets to him. He was grappling with the guilt of causing trauma, whilst dealing with the descent of his life falling apart, with no real fault of his own.?

Coming to a couple of things about the production, Dreams Scenario is a well-edited film. It’s safe to say writer-director-editor Kristoffer Borgli knows how to execute a clever exploration of a subject matter, production-wise. The use of music to build up a dramatic scene and to be able to almost immediately release the tension with comic relief is quite thrilling to watch. Diagetic and non-diegetic sounds are played around with interestingly. Some moments make you laugh out loud, including but not limited to a sexual scene in its entirety, a meeting room scene with its silences, and of course, a classroom conversation about zebras. The editing of this film makes it a visceral experience, very refreshingly so.?

Before it turns into a bunch of Gen-Z kids playing with gadgets and practising safe space therapy in a gymnasium, Dream Scenario serves as a topical commentary on fame and the perceivedness of public figures. The life-changing hold that an IDEA of a person in the public discourse has, how powerful and more importantly, how consequential it can be, is quite incredible. Dream Scenario does a fantastic job of narrating this with its storytelling via the lens of a very intriguing Paul Matthews. It fails, however, to land it well. That is to say, the courageous cocky zebra who starts by standing out of the crowd by sticking its neck out (beautifully so) ends up playing it safe and going back to the herd.?

“Everything is traumatic nowadays, they need to grow up”