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Dream Scenario: A Bold And Innovative Indictment Of The Digital Age

This is #CineFile where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news. Today: Dream Scenario.

Rahul Desai

Jan 06, 2024

Dream Scenario

THE premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario reads: A mild-mannered professor starts to inexplicably appear in the dreams of people around the world. Imagine the sci-fi possibilities. Given our cinematic conditioning (and the film’s low budget), it’s normal to expect an inventive love story or a poignant portrait of new-age loneliness. Something on the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Her. Especially if the protagonist were a psychology professor. Or even an edgy indie version of Inception. Or at the most, a swipe at the cynicism and pitfalls of the middle-aged dating scene.

The last thing one might expect is a dark horror-comic satire about the fickleness of modern celebrity, the subconscious whims of cancel culture, and the surreal machinations of the social media age. It’s a distinctly European take on contemporary living, bringing to mind the creative commentary of one-liner satires like Look Who’s Back (Hitler wakes up in 2015) and Colossal (an alcoholic unwittingly wreaks creature-film havoc in a distant country). It’s no coincidence that this film falters in its third act, when it paints itself into a corner in pursuit of last-ditch sentimentalism. There’s a lovely lens-flare embrace in dying light — the romantic frame we expected from the onset — as well as a heartbreaking final line. But by then, emotion feels like a copout of sorts.

First, some context. The biology professor, Paul (Nicolas Cage of course), is a bit of a loser. He has a solid family life, but he’s the kind of man who always dreamt of more. Early on, we see him meekly confront a former colleague for publishing a paper on a subject he had planned to write a book about. That’s when the first signs of the film’s digital theme emerge. Paul is a ‘writer’ who only thinks about writing. He’s not much of a doer. He’s like a cinephile who speaks of reviewing movies but is yet to start a blog. This is evident from how — when strangers see him in their dreams — he’s always a passive bystander. Most of his students have apocalyptic dreams, but Paul is always casually strolling through the wreckage. It’s the equivalent of going viral for being unremarkable, an all-too-common motif these days.

To Borgli’s credit, the film-making refuses to distinguish the character’s real-world experiences from a dreamscape. At one point, a mentally ill man breaks into Paul’s family home at night, and Paul’s hapless actions — of simply standing in a corner and yelling — suggest that he could be in his wife or daughters’ dreams. Just like that, he becomes famous for being famous. Everyone recognises him for being that guy. These moments are funny without descending into parody.

Things change when he makes a small mistake (re-enacting a wet dream for a Gen Z executive), but not literally. Suddenly, Paul’s presence in everyone’s dreams becomes lethal and sinister. The people who were once fascinated by him become petrified of him. He gets fired because his students can’t handle his face anymore. His family is heckled. They lose face. The world turns on him. For no real fault of his own, Paul is cancelled everywhere — he becomes the ultimate pop-cultural villain. In a scene that’s as farcical as it is sad, he posts an apology video online in which he ends up weeping for being a victim. He is immediately told by his wife — in true Twitter (now X) activism parlance — that his apology is “self-serving and insincere”.

The novelty of Dream Scenario lies in how the film’s gaze isn’t immediately obvious. It unfolds like a deeply disguised indictment of fame and agency in the digital age. The critique isn’t caustic or from a space of boomer-talk. There’s a sense of melancholy about how Paul’s life unravels in the public eye. For a while, he’s frustratingly perceptive about how “trauma is a trend” and hyper-aware millennials with keyboards tend to trivialise everything from suicide (‘kms’ stands for ‘kill myself’ apparently) to heartbreak. The patterns are cheeky, too. For instance, France is the only country that still likes him.

Once Paul is hurled into the direction of being the most ‘hated man on the planet,’ he has no choice but to capitalise on that image. His PR firm takes him on a shady Parisian book tour, and the title of his book is changed from ‘Dream Scenario’ to ‘I Am Your Nightmare’. It’s a sharply observed riff on an era in which people reverse-engineer a provocative stand to make the news, rather than making the news with a genuine stand. Paul is nothing like the monster that appears in everyone’s nightmares, but he finds himself having to make some money off that impression.

The problem, however, is when the film restores its focus to Paul’s marriage towards the end. Up until then, his wife is one of the many people who distrust and dump Paul. So the beautifully filmed climax between them — where dreams bleed into reality — doesn’t feel earned. In isolation, the scenes work. But there’s a carelessness about why they happen for the sake of storytelling.

Nicolas Cage is one of those rare A-listers with prolific B-movie muscle, and his late-career surge seems to have peaked with his performance as Paul, the epicentre of a global miracle. He makes Dream Scenario work even when it doesn’t. The meta angst that emerged in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent finds more shape in this film. There seems to be a unique and self-curious understanding between the fading Hollywood star and the evolving environment he occupies. It’s not easy to play an unlikable protagonist who earns our sympathy by virtue of being misinterpreted and loathed. It’s because of him that the central metaphor of dreaming never gets too heavy-handed. There’s a subliminal connection between the way we perceive online identity and the information our mind chooses to grasp. The most peripheral figures — sometimes total strangers on our Facebook walls and Twitter timelines — penetrate our subconscious in strange ways.

For example, I had the most random dream about a woman in 2018, someone I barely knew and hadn’t spoken to, but whose Facebook handle I was familiar with. I had never stalked her profile either. It was the kind of dream that felt like a strong premonition — as if we were together without really being together. Months later, we started chatting, and she is now my partner of five years. That’s the dream scenario. But last year, I saw a few tweets by a film-maker accused of plagiarism. A few recurring dreams later, I was convinced that he was guilty. It didn’t matter if it was true or not. That’s the anatomy of a nightmare — one that most of us navigate without quite realising it. For every fairytale, there are a hundred cautionary tales. And Paul Matthews will go down as the most unsettling manifestation of this trial-by-wire syndrome. ‘Living the dream’ is not as romantic as it sounds.