Paul Matthews, lecturer on bio-something at an obscure university, is fond of using zebras as an example of misunderstood camouflage. The stripes are there, he argues, not to help the animals blend in with foliage but to help them blend in with each other. Predators need to distinguish one target from another before striking. It doesn’t require much work to read that lesson as a metaphor for Paul’s journey in this delightfully off-centre fable from the director of the similarly tart Norwegian satire Sick of Myself.
Nicolas Cage plays Paul as a very American sort of depressive. Hair cut back to an unruly arc around shiny pate, always cloaked in layers of anorak, he could easily have emerged from a film by Charlie Kaufman (for whom Cage excelled in Adaptation). Early on, we learn he is doing just enough to get by. He has secured tenure, but he hasn’t got around to starting a long-gestated book. Still, he remains contented enough chewing grass with the herd.
All that changes with a shift into the world of late Luis Buñuel. Someone thinks they recognise him in a restaurant. Then an acquaintance notes she has dreamed about him. Soon the whole world is dreaming about Paul Matthews. He is famous. He pulls on an unconvincing swagger when appearing before his mildly impressed students. Our hero is not entirely happy that he is always a passive figure in the dreams – standing by while disasters befall the sleeper – but the fame does get him a meeting with a marketing consultancy called Thoughts. Michael Cera has fun with an all-too-plausible stripe of baloney as the head creative. Maybe they could get Obama to dream about him. Would that work?
To this point, the picture has dabbled in largely easy-going surreal parody. Nobody is going to much object to digs at the influencer wrangling at Thoughts. The always excellent Julianne Nicholson makes something deceptively sly of Paul’s wife. She is supportive but not above using her husband’s renown for professional advancement. Shot in permanent damp by Benjamin Loeb – who did such good work for Cage in Mandy – Dream Scenario looks to be playing out like an extended sketch.
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All that swivels when Paul turns nasty in the world’s dreams. He is not welcome at dinner parties. Students lobby for his removal. It is plainly no accident that Dream Scenario is set around a university. Kristoffer Borgli, writer, director and editor, has something to say about the advance of “cancel culture”, but, lest one get the impression this is solely an attack on w*ke youth, he has the folk at Thoughts try to salvage affairs by directing him towards Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. This appals him. “I didn’t do anything!” Paul pleads. All he wants is to underachieve peacefully among all the other zebras. Dream Scenario is pleading for everyone, everywhere to take a breath.
The cast is consistently strong, but, still fleshing out the most peculiar of careers, Cage carries all with a blend of existential desperation and creepy ineffectualness (most memorably in the year’s most squalidly uncomfortable sex scene). One remarkable dream sequence has him appear taut and menacing with a deadly crossbow. It reminds us Cage once was that character for Jerry Bruckheimer. For all the dross he has done to pay bills, he approaches 60 as one of the most versatile actors in the business.
Dream Scenario doesn’t quite make it over the line. A late science-fiction variation looks to have been borrowed from an entirely different school of weird satire. But this remains a bracingly original, notably creepy film that leaves you brooding on its knotty messages.
Dream Scenario is in cinemas from Friday, November 10th
