Dream Scenario (2023)

Kristoffer Borgli's Dream Scenario arrives bearing the A24 seal and the premise of a mild-mannered professor who colonizes the sleeping minds of strangers. Nicolas Cage plays Paul Matthews with a limp dignity that curdles into grievance, and the film follows him from anonymity to viral ubiquity to public revulsion with the patience of a man watching a slow leak. It is a comedy about humiliation, and it commits fully to the humiliation.

For all its topical furniture, the film withholds the sermon. The cast is largely white and largely unremarked upon. Tim Meadows appears as a colleague, and the film does not pause to congratulate itself for his presence. There is no romance, no subplot, no gesture toward the identity politics of the moment. The women in Paul's orbit exist as wife, daughter, assistant, and the film treats them as people inside a story about a man, not as vehicles for a thesis. Race, sexuality, climate, the body, the mind: none of these are pressed into service. The film has other business, and it attends to it.

That business is commerce. The third act reveals that the shared subconscious has become an advertising channel, with a PR firm eager to have Paul shill for Sprite and dreams sold as inventory. This is a genuine swipe at commodification, delivered with a smirk instead of a placard. The film also circles cancel culture, the fickleness of fame, the speed with which a beloved stranger becomes a villain. It observes. It does not instruct. For a movie so fluent in the anxieties of the decade, it is remarkably reluctant to tell us what to think, which may be its quietest virtue.