102 min | R | November 10, 2023 | A24
Paul Matthews is a tenured biology professor so unremarkable that nobody remembers him. Then strangers across the world start seeing him in their dreams, doing nothing, just standing there. Fame finds the one man least equipped to survive it.
Paul Matthews is a balding evolutionary biology professor who has spent his life feeling overlooked. Strangers begin dreaming about him. In the dreams he does nothing. He simply appears, passive and benign, while disasters unfold around the people sleeping. The phenomenon makes Paul a global curiosity overnight, and he mistakes attention for the recognition he believes he is owed. Dream Scenario is about a man who craves significance and learns that significance arrives on terms he cannot control.
Nicolas Cage plays Paul as a small, resentful, profoundly ordinary man. He hunches. He stammers through faculty meetings. He nurses petty grievances about an old colleague who he claims stole his ideas. Cage strips away every trace of movie-star charisma and replaces it with the specific neediness of a man who confuses being seen with being valued. Julianne Nicholson plays his wife Janet with a weary tenderness that curdles as Paul’s behavior grows desperate. Michael Cera plays Trent, a marketing executive who wants to monetize Paul’s notoriety, and Tim Meadows plays Brett, the dean who must decide what to do when the dreams turn ugly.
Kristoffer Borgli writes and directs with a control that keeps the satire from collapsing into a single joke. The dream sequences use flat, naturalistic lighting and unhurried framing, which makes the surreal events more unsettling than any horror flourish would. Borgli stages the waking world in muted institutional tones, beige offices and gray lecture halls, so Paul’s life looks as forgettable as he fears it is. The editing lets scenes run past the point of comfort, holding on Paul’s face as a viral interview or a faculty confrontation slides from awkward into excruciating. Borgli understands that humiliation works best in real time.
The film tracks how the same crowd that elevates Paul will turn on him the instant his image stops flattering them. Borgli builds the second half around cancellation and refuses to make Paul a martyr or a monster. Paul is a vain, mediocre man who wanted to matter and got exactly that wish in its cruelest form. The closing stretch reaches for sentiment that the sharper earlier sections do not quite earn. Even so, this is a precise and uncomfortable comedy about a culture that manufactures celebrity and then demands a sacrifice.