Not one of my favorites.

I had higher hopes for Dream Scenario, but as far as A24 films go I have to say it’s coming up toward the bottom.

Dream Scenario is a film I really wanted to enjoy because the premise sounds like it’d be right up my alley. An A24 film where Nicolas Cage plays a schlubby professor who inexplicably starts showing up in people’s dreams? How could they possibly go wrong? I’ll tell you how in the next paragraphs of this review. Directed by Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself), the film of course stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews.

Paul is a biology professor who is otherwise a completely boring and uninteresting person. He has a wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and two daughters Sophie (Lily Bird) and Hannah (Jessica Clement). His life is turned upside down when he goes viral online and in his local town due to a shared phenomenon of people having dreams about him. And not dreaming about him in a weird way, Paul simply shows up and just kinda hangs around before leaving. Well except one person.

Seeing this as an opportunity to get famous and forward his actual plan of publishing that book he’s swore to work on for years now, Paul embraces the celebrity status. Unfortunately things go topsy turvy when Paul’s dreamsona starts beating the crap out of people and murdering them and sexually assaulting them in their dreams, leading Paul to become something of a villain for things he has no part in and is not responsible for. This leads to strain on his marriage, his career, and his friendships. Can Paul make it through this and come out the other side? It’s an A24 film, so no…he can’t.

My big problem with Dream Scenario is that they take a lot of the film setting up a concept only to never let it pay off. The film hits close to home with Paul’s insistence that he’s totally going to write that book one day, he’s just waiting for the right opportunity and he’d kinda appreciate if his coworkers didn’t write similar studies. You can see that manifest in Paul’s clear offense to the dreams. He doesn’t care that people are dreaming about him, but it’s really chapping his ass that they seem to view him as a passive creature just coasting through existence.

To compare it to one of my favorite A24 films Lamb, the events of those films can be drawn to the mental state of the two stars. But rather than work Paul’s state of being into the events of the movie, they just seem to happen in spite of him rather than because of him. It has a lot of interesting ideas that could be expanded on. The movie briefly touches on the idea of cancel culture and “lived experiences,” and the idea of everyone hating you for something you truly have no control over and everyone knows you didn’t actually do, but they hate you anyway. There’s also a little topic on the fleeting nature of the internet and how nobody wants to become the villain of the day.

The third act of the film is unfortunately where it crashes into the glass coffee table and bleeds out, where Borgli seems to have just put his hands up and said “something something, it’s called a metaphor.” While the acting is fantastic, the characters are expertly crafted, and the first two acts set up something interesting, the film fails to follow through with a payoff. It feels like that nightmare where you’re back in college and you write this big thesis only for the morning of the due date to come around and realize you didn’t save the last ten pages and you’ve got twenty minutes to figure something out before hitting submit.

This is probably one of those films that we’ll come back to in a year and have a higher opinion of. Right now though I have to say I’m disappointed that I so excitedly waited for this film to hit streaming.

Rating: C+