A hapless family man finds his life turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. When his nighttime appearances take a nightmarish turn, Paul is forced to navigate his newfound stardom.

What do you get when you mix Nicolas Cage, cancel culture and nightmares? The answer is ‘Dream Scenario’, an inventive black comedy that explores what happens to a seemingly ordinary man who finds himself randomly appearing in strangers dreams. On the face of it, this would seem like another zany vehicle for Nicolas Cage to do Nicolas Cage things, but this is actually quite a thoughtful movie and Cage himself is fairly dialled down. Cancel culture has been one of the hot topics of the last five years or so and ‘Dream Scenario’ explores the effects of that on one person through the lens of someone who hasn’t done anything to ‘deserve’ to be cancelled.

Cage stars as Paul Matthews, a long time biology professor who appears to have a comfortable, easy life, with a nice family and a stable job, albeit with a few regrets at not achieving the success in his field that he wanted. That fame soon comes to him though, when an ex-girlfriend journalist writes an article about the dream phenomenon, leading to countless others across the globe noting that they have also been experiencing Paul appearing in their dreams. Initially Paul embraces his fifteen minutes of fame, with his presence in people’s dreams being that of a benign bystander, but that soon changes when ‘dream Paul’ starts brutally murdering and assaulting people. This leads to the flipside of that fame, as people start to fear Paul with students refusing to go to his classes and people objecting to eating in the same café as him.

I enjoyed ‘Dream Scenario’s’ observations on modern pop culture and society, albeit some of the satirising of terminology (‘lived experience’ etc) and the softness of youth felt a little on the nose. Cage is really good and perfectly cast as a man having to deal with events happening to him, and I thought the story unfolds well with plenty of laugh out loud moments, and it’s a movie I’ve thought about quite a lot since seeing it. Whether it quite grapples successfully with the themes it explores, I’m not so sure, but ‘Dream Scenario’ is certainly an entertaining movie and one definitely worth checking out.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Kristoffer Borgli

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula and Dylan Baker

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/