Released: 1st January
Seen: 31st March
There is no term on the planet that I hate more than “Cancel Culture”, it’s a term that was basically invented by assholes to make it seem like being told to stop being racist/sexist/bigoted was a free speech violation. It’s almost always an attempt for people to brush aside consequences for when they act like an idiot in public… that being said, there are some times when the reaction by the internet is horribly over the top. Sometimes someone in public makes a joke that’s a little off-colour or does something that’s accidentally disrespectful, the internet jumps on them and vilifies them for a while before the person makes a grovelling apology which only makes things worse until the internet moves onto their next target. On Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else than that) we call this the Twitter Main Character where the ultimate goal is not to become that person. It looks like the cycle of the Twitter Main Character has officially gone mainstream because Dream Scenario is basically a feature film based around that concept and it’s just as weird and hilarious as you might expect.
Dream Scenario introduces us to the most average man to ever live, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage). Paul couldn’t be more average if he tried. He has a wife and two kids, he’s a biology professor working on a book he wants to one day get published, never does anything interesting and is basically what would happen if the concept of default settings were a person. He’s as bland as dehydrated paper… and he’s also appearing in everyone’s dreams. When I say everyone, I do mean pretty much everyone, people just start randomly seeing Paul walking about in their dreams and it turns him into a cultural phenomenon of sorts. He starts trying to use this to hopefully get that book published, maybe do some good with it for his family but when the dreams turn from peaceful to violent, the world turns on Paul and he ends up living his own personal nightmare.
Dream Scenario is a cautionary tale about the trappings of fame as told through the lens of someone trying to make a sequel to the Nightmare on Elm Street films and it’s absolutely fascinating. The entire plot is a speed run of the aforementioned Main Character story, with something kind of weird happening to turn Paul into a superstar and then one negative thing happens that’s out of his control turns the world against him, destroying his life and marriage in the process. It’s the horrors of fame taken to the extreme, a guy who didn’t even do anything to try and become famous ending up being ruined by the fame that was thrust upon him and it’s all so carefully handled in a way that makes you not only feel terribly for Paul, but on some level you get why the people who see Paul would be scared of him.
The dream sequences that reoccur through Dream Scenario are glorious, they’re the kind of weird surreal dream imagery that is always just gorgeous to look at filled with that perfect dream logic that makes these scenes fun to put into a film. They also do the classic thing that made the Nightmare movies so scary where you can’t quite tell when the dreams begin, making you wonder just how much of the entire film is just one long surreal nightmare. Also, it’s absolutely fair to make the Nightmare on Elm Street comparison, the film itself does that by literally getting the main character to put on a Freddy glove so they acknowledge that they’re playing in that territory but using it to explore just what being public enemy number one can do to a person who doesn’t deserve it.
That naturally leads us to the thing that really makes this whole film work and that’s Nicolas Cage’s brilliant performance. He plays the quiet reserved average guy so well that when the time comes for him to be a little more over the top and intimidating (AKA do the thing that we kind of expect from Nicholas Cage) it has a bigger impact and really helps to set the tone. You end up getting why the people who have these dreams might be scared when they see Paul in real life, you get how this could spread and overtake someone’s life and how he might become desperate enough to do something to try and fix the problem so he can return to normal. The idea behind the film is so strange that it requires an actor as strangely talented as Nicholas Cage to get the message across and in the hands of anyone else it probably wouldn’t work, but in his hands the strangeness becomes natural.
While the film is dealing with the personal impacts of sudden fame, it’s also got a few glorious barbs aimed at those who exploit the suddenly famous. Characters like the lying agent, the publishers who make shady edits without getting permission or the grifters trying to use these events to advertise shitty products all get a good roasting here. Dream Scenario really is just the nightmare of fame but in feature film form. Each weird little element is handled quickly but effectively, the film wants to spend most of its time dealing with how this all impacts Paul but when it touches on the larger issues it handles them really well. With a little over 100 minutes the film is trying to speed through the story, but all the beats work well enough to make for a compelling watch.
Dream Scenario is the nightmare of fame made real, all the worst elements of our cultural obsession with notoriety turned up to 11 in a way that’s darkly hilarious and captivating. With fascinating strange performances, incredible visuals and enough twisted insanity to appease pretty much everyone, Dream Scenario shines a light on a cultural issue we all take part in and tries to let us see the impacts of the digital dogpile… sure, it probably won’t change anything about how we treat the suddenly infamous, but at least now we have a pretty great film about how shitty we can be to these people.
Movie Meister Reviews 