In Nicolas Cage’s new movie, going viral is the stuff of nightmares
Dream Scenario asks a scary question for our times: What does it feel like to get canceled by strangers?
Nobody goes to the movies for a message about the internet. So filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli wrapped his in a bizarro premise with plenty of comedy and a surprisingly apt character for lead actor Nicolas Cage.
In the new Dream Scenario, opening in Australian cinemas after Christmas, Cage plays an unremarkable guy who starts showing up inexplicably in others’ dreams, even those of far-flung strangers. It brings him a strange and unintentional fame, one that starts to sour as public perception shifts against the man making bedtime cameos in people’s minds.
It’s an allegory for the way viral celebrity coexists with backlash, and an example of filmmakers dissecting online phenomena with cinematic tools such as satire and horror. The recent movie Fingernails addressed dating apps indirectly with a futuristic story about a service that administers a gory physical test to determine true love.
The latest season of the dystopian anthology TV series Black Mirror took on the way companies convert users’ private lives into commercial content.
When Borgli made Dream Scenario, he was also thinking about the way public discourse gets reduced to an exchange of snippets on social media. “Any big topic, even complicated things on a massive global scale, are debated in bite sizes and in the same style,” he says, “and I think that looks kind of dumb sometimes.”
Borgli, who is Norwegian, is receiving a new level of attention after making short films and a 2022 debut feature titled Sick of Myself, a satire about a woman who disfigures herself for likes. Dream Scenario, which he wrote and directed, started with some dry reading: Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of dreams and Carl Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious.
Borgli, whose father is a retired social anthropologist, became excited about transposing these concepts on the way people get catapulted out of obscurity by social media.
“I just feel that the vast amount of people that you can engage with is a bit scary,” he says. Applying the dream analogy, he adds, “The idea of someone coming up to you and saying, ‘I had a dream about you,’ is somewhat pleasant. But if thousands and then millions of people start saying that ... whoa.”
Borgli says he didn’t have an actor in mind when writing the screenplay, just a mental image of the main character, Paul Matthews, a middling academic, husband and father with a certainty that he’s entitled to more.
Borgli inserted Paul into a plot device borrowed from the horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street – instead of Freddy Krueger, folks in Dream Scenario are visited in their sleep by a beta-male bystander. As one character describes Paul’s recurring role in her dreams, “he just occupies the space like an awkward guest at a party that nobody really knows.”
Dream Scenario was financed by A24, a hot indie studio with a track record of high-concept releases, including the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. The filmmaker Ari Aster is a producer. His movies for A24 include the horror hits Midsommar and Hereditary and the recent Joaquin Phoenix vehicle Beau Is Afraid.
Cage’s casting automatically added a meta layer of symbolism to Dream Scenario. Cage’s gonzo acting style has been fodder for countless internet memes featuring out-of-context images from movies such as Face/Off, Vampire’s Kiss and Con Air. Cage (who played a fictional character named Nick Cage in last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) has spoken about the challenge of being a serious actor who comes off as a caricature online.
Cage plays Paul, an evolutionary biologist with an unfulfilled dream of writing a book about ants. He has a bald pate, a nasal drawl and insecurities that are quick to surface. When Paul goes viral in dreams, he takes credit for the random phenomenon. “I’m special, I guess,” he says in a TV news segment. He wants to believe he’s “the most interesting person in the world right now,” according to a marketing bro (played by Michael Cera) who tries to put Paul in a Sprite campaign.
The matter-of-fact way Borgli depicts dreams and Paul’s role in them is key to the movie’s effect, with bizarre milieus that straddle comedy and horror. Paul looks on as one of his daughters floats into the sky like a lost balloon. He wanders by a student from his college seminar who is fleeing from a bloody attacker, and another student huddling on a piano as crocodiles close in. The dream sequences play out as mini movies, with Cage calibrating his performance to each surreal set-up, Borgli says.
“It was really exciting to get so many Nick Cages out of him.”
As Paul plays an increasingly active part in people’s dreams, especially their nightmares, he’s plagued by real-life repercussions of cancel culture.
Hoping Dream Scenario will cause some virality of its own, Borgli says, “I’m more than happy to have my work live in everyone’s heads.”
Dream Scenario opens in cinemas on January 1.
The Wall Street Journal