Dream Scenario opens with a quick flash of images, as if the entire film is meant to be remembered as a dream. The film shifts focus too heavily onto its metaphors and real-world analogues to quite live up to its potential, but right off the bat, you know you’re in for a special, unique experience that understands the language of film and uses it beautifully.
In Dream Scenario, evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage, who also produces) discovers he is inexplicably appearing in the dreams of millions of people around the world, quickly becoming a viral celebrity. Matthews’ roles in the dreams seem to follow his own internal state. At first, when he is unaware of what is going on, he is a bystander, merely passing and waving through other people’s recurring nightmares. As the phenomenon grows, he becomes an agent of wish-fulfillment, sex and adventure, but when he discovers he can’t use his newfound celebrity to advance his life goals, his dream presence becomes violent, and millions of people dream about him raping or murdering them.
Dream Scenario is a highly cinematic treat. The premise is rich for tons of wild scenes and bizarre Nicholas Cage behavior, all created with practical effects to maintain a grounded, frightening realism even when people start floating or alligators appear out of nowhere – much like a dream would really feel. Writer/director/editor Kristoffer Borgli knocks it out of the park in his English-language debut.
The bold decision to shoot on 35mm film affects what content can be approached. If they’d shot digitally, it might have been easier to draw things in or give different dreams different tints without raising the budget too much, but the tangibility of film and was more important to Dream Scenario, and so we get that firm reality, and the special effects are limited to aggressive use of lighting, makeup and wirework.
Films are, themselves, dreams, which use the space of a movie theater to hijack viewers’ visual and auditory input, to the point that dream analysis is often a big part of film analysis. Carl Jung’s theory of dreams as a manifestation of the “collective subconscious” is referenced as a potential explanation for what’s happening to Matthews within the film, but the movies are an industrial version of this idea.
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