During a bustling opening weekend at a film festival, discovering a standout film amidst a sea of mediocrity can feel exhilarating. This happened in 2022 when director Kristoffer Borgli made waves with his impressive dark comedy, Sick of Myself. The following year he returned to the festival circuit with a noteworthy new creation, Dream Scenario, which has solidified Borgli’s place as one of the most exciting new filmmakers on the scene.

Featuring a career-high performance from Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario follows Paul Matthews, an unremarkable middle-aged professor whose life takes an extraordinary turn when he appears in the dreams of millions of strangers. After he becomes a worldwide phenomenon, his presence in the dreamworld turns from innocent to violent. Paul grapples with his new found infamy while dealing with the impact it has on his family, ego, and morals. Given Cage’s history of becoming an overused internet meme, his portrayal of Paul is just as informed by his own persona as when he played himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. While the story’s weight squarely rests on Cage’s shoulders, the supporting characters are just as crucial to the film’s strange singularity. Picking up any slack the script had, there were standout performances from Julianne Nicholson, Dylan Gelula, and Michael Cera.

Dream Scenario follows the aesthetic palette of the A24 family it belongs to, and even has the stamp of Ari Aster, who produced the film. The tone dances on the line between absurdist comedy and new wave horror, but attempts to transcend genre altogether. Borgli himself described it as a Kaufman-esque reversal of A Nightmare on Elm Street. He was able to craft the familiar yet inexplicable feeling of dreaming, translating it into an audio-visual delight that’s both seamless and inventive. The line between reality and dream blurs, yet there’s always an unsettling sense of the uncanny valley. During the premiere at TIFF, Borgli revealed that the production design team would intentionally remove minor details when transitioning into dream sequences. For instance, in reality, the books on a shelf had their usual titles, but in the dream, they were just a row of blank spines. The tiny yet affective choice really echoed what it’s like to fall into a dream, where the people and circumstances are so vivid but everything else dissolves into unidentifiable background noise. 

Now that we’ve got all the praise of the way, let’s dial in on the film’s only downfall— succumbing to the third act curse. It’s not unusual for writers such as Borgli to phone it in for the finale of their script. I call it the Ryan Murphy effect. In the case of Dream Scenario, the shrewdly meta concept uses its last breath to become a surface-level commentary on cancel culture. While the idea itself is not totally useless, the execution falls flat. Borgli is trying to say so much about the extremely online generation, while having nothing to really say at all. Adding in jump-scares of Noah Centineo and name-drops of Jordan Peterson in what was once a surrealist movie is quite maddening.

Luckily, the trite detour doesn’t erase the film’s other merits. There is still a hilarious, fart-joke-filled, self-referential, solid 3.5 star movie here. After the twenty-or-so-minute pedantic dwell on the woke youth of today, Dream Scenario ends with a full circle, heartfull ending. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it would be a perfect double feature with Stop Making Sense.

Dir: Kristoffer Borgli
Prod: Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, Jacob Jaffke
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Dylan Gelula, Michael Cera
Release Date: November 10, 2023