Dream Scenario review: Nicolas Cage is on peak form in this surreal, nightmare-filled dark comedy (2024)

Cage's career has taken many twists and turns. But his latest performance, playing a neurotic professor who starts popping up in people's dreams, is one of his best yet, writes Caryn James.

In this delirious dark comedy, Nicolas Cage and director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) take us down a rabbit hole, with the eccentric, unclassifiable star ideally paired to a filmmaker with a wonderfully mordant imagination. Cage plays Paul, a nondescript professor who, for no reason, starts popping up in other people's dreams – first his family's, then his students' and strangers' all over the world.

Cage's name, of course, brings to mind his many over-the-top, meme-fuelling roles, and maybe his dramatic triumphs in films like the recent Pig (2021). But this film reminds us of how amusing he is as a schlubby sad sack, like Charlie Kaufman's fictional, less talented twin, Donald, in Adaptation (2002). Paul is socially awkward and looks like a walking cliché of a professor – balding, with wire-rimmed glasses and a beard­. In a masterfully droll, low-key performance, Cage grounds the film in the reality of this ordinary man living in the suburbs with his wife (Julianne Nicholson) and two teenaged daughters.

But he and Borgli also reveal Paul's delusional expectations. He asks for an apology from a graduate school colleague whose recent publication borrowed a vague idea Paul floated decades before. And he hopes to find a publisher for an academic study in evolutionary biology – his book on ants – even though he has yet to start writing it or anything else.

Paul basks in the viral fame that comes from being a benign, passive presence in the background of everyone's dreams until he starts turning up in violent nightmares, leaving people as terrified of him in life as if he really were Freddy Krueger. That is revealed in the film's trailer, but Borgli also drops a huge clue when the film opens with ominous, horror-movie sound effects and images flashing on screen of an apparently ordinary scene by the family's pool that turns out to be anything but. He deftly signals that something in this film's world is abnormal.

Soon the nightmare version of Paul takes on a life of its own, detached from anything he has said or done. Cage has said about the character, "I had the life experience to play him because [of] what happened to so-called Nic Cage with the internet." Yet the film doesn't wink at the audience. Cage makes Paul so distinct and credible that the film never becomes meta in the way of last year's sly satire The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage played a fictional version of his meme-ified self.

Although you can enjoy Dream Scenario simply as a comic story, the true sign of its ambition and accomplishment is that it operates on many levels beyond that. The film is not primarily about its themes of fame or cancel culture. More trenchantly, it questions what is real and explores how the unconscious influences everyday life, as the world's nightmares of Paul impact his family and career. Borgli's sensibility is attuned to that of Ari Aster, who is one of the film's producers. Like Aster's Beau is Afraid and Midsommar, Dream Scenario lives perfectly balanced on the border between the real and the surreal.

Borgli's previous feature, Sick of Myself (2022), was another satisfying black comedy with tragic undertones, about a young woman who deliberately takes a drug known to disfigure faces in order to become a viral sensation. If that film doesn't come from a person thinking about the dark impulses beneath everyday life I don't know what does.

Borgli is virtuosic in the playful way Dream Scenario catches viewers off guard. We eventually come to know what is a dream and what is real, but we don't always know that at the start of any scene. When an intruder enters a house late at night, that could be either one.

Yet the film doesn't completely hold up. Michael Cera and Kate Berlant play executives at an agency trying to help Paul capitalise on his fame by embedding product placement along with him in people's dreams, an idea that could have been funnier than it is. And the ending is lame, with a futuristic idea about dream technology that feels forced.

Still, this absorbing film is likely to stay with you. It's a compliment to say that you may walk away with the off-kilter feeling that you have been in another person's dream the whole time.

★★★★☆

Dream Scenario is released on 10 November in the US and UK