What if one man could be found in everyone’s dreams? That’s what happens in the Kristoffer Borgli movie from November 2023, Dream Scenario. A man named Paul Matthews (played by Nicolas Cage) is a family man and a professor at the town’s University and sees himself as the most average man. Then his life takes a turn when millions of people across the world start seeing him in his dreams. As the months go on, Paul becomes quite famous, but as his life gets more chaotic with the fame and stress, the dreams become more nightmarish.
Rotten Tomatoes gives this movie a 91% reviewer score, but only a 68% audience score. IMDB gave the movie a 7/10, but I believe that this movie isn’t deserving of such scores. Was the movie high in quality? Yes, I will not dismiss the technical aspects of the movie making it look great. But that’s about it. To me, the story is just uncomfortable. Not only the concept about an old man being in everyone’s dreams, but there was about a 20 minute stretch of the movie where Paul very blatantly cheats on his wife, which is quite graphic, more specifically the long scene is uncomfortable, uncanny, creepy, and disturbing.
As the movie progresses, Paul gets more frustrated with his life, wanting to be known for his book, but winds up being feared by his students and known for being the real life Freddy Kruger. Paul loses his wife, Janet, since her career is being put into jeopardy simply because she’s married to Paul, which causes him to spiral downward even deeper than before.
Throughout the entire movie, Janet asks Paul why he isn’t in her dreams. This sticks with Paul, for the rest of the movie. Once the traumatizing events calm down and the world has moved on from the disaster with Paul, a company makes a device that you can personally be in specific people’s dreams. Paul uses this device to try to get in his wife’s dream, after many attempts he finally gets in, tells his wife he misses her, and the movie ends. Just like that.
This movie doesn’t feel like anything has been concluded, there is no conclusion. When I reached the part of the movie where Paul finally entered his wife’s dream, I thought to myself “Okay, this feels like we have about 15 more minutes left.” and the movie just cut to a black screen, and the credits started rolling. I had to look up an ‘ending explained’ article just to wrap my head around the ending.
After reading an article from Liam Gaughan, a writer for Collider, “Everyone seems to know Paul’s face, but they can’t be bothered to learn anything about him.” (Mar 16, 2024) Which that is true, but the movie does feel to be more about ‘Cancel Culture’ but this movie was the strangest way to open up to the topic.
I’ve now had a few days to process the whole movie, and my lasting remarks is, I didn’t like the movie. I would give this movie a 1 out of 5 stars. (Personally a 1 star movie for me means that I do not want to ever watch this movie again, possibly, I will actively avoid watching this movie again.) I also feel like this was another movie from Nick Cage that he just said yes to. Many recent movies from Cage have been like that. Such as, Reinfield (2023), The Retirement Plan (2023), and Willy’s Wonderland (2021). But if he’s having fun making these movies, all the more power to him.
